In spite of these wanderings, 's course in life, so far as his poor life could have any course or aim beyond that of screening itself from swift death, was getting more and more clear to him; and he pursued it , in the only way permitted him, by hasty snatches, in the of continual , change of place and other interruption.  
Such, once for all, were the conditions appointed him. And it must be owned he had, with a most temper, adjusted himself to these; you would have said, he loved them; it was almost as if he would have chosen them as the suitablest. Such an adaptation was there in him of to necessity:—for indeed they both, if well seen into, proceeded from one source. Sterling's bodily disease was the expression, under physical conditions, of the too life which, under the moral, the intellectual and other aspects, struggled within him. Too vehement;—which would have required a frame of oak and iron to contain it: in a thin though most wiry body of flesh and bone, it incessantly "wore holes," and so found for itself. He could take no rest, he had never learned that art; he was, as we often reproached him, fatally of sitting still. Rapidity, as of pulsing auroras, as of dancing lightnings: rapidity in all forms characterized him. This, which was his bane, in many senses, being the real origin of his , and of such continual necessity to move and change,—was also his , so far as antidote there might be; enabling him to love change, and to snatch, as few others could have done, from the waste years, all tumbled into ruin by change, what hours and minutes of available turned up. He had an incredible facility of . He flashed with most piercing glance into a subject; gathered it up into organic utterability, with truly wonderful , considering the success and truth ; and threw it on paper with a swift felicity, , brilliancy and general , of which, under such conditions of swiftness, I have never seen a parallel. an genius; as his Father too was, and of admirable completeness he too, though under a very different form.
 
If Sterling has done little in Literature, we may ask, What other man than he, in such circumstances, could have done anything? In of these rapid , which otherwise cost him so dear, he has built together, out of those wavering boiling quicksands of his few later years, a result which may justly surprise us. There is actually some result in those poor Two Volumes gathered from him, such as they are; he that reads there will not wholly lose his time, nor rise with a malison instead of a on the writer. Here actually is a real seer-glance, of some compass, into the world of our day; blessed glance, once more, of an eye that is human; truer than one of a thousand, and beautifully capable of making others see with it. I have known considerable temporary reputations gained, considerable piles of temporary guineas, with loud reviewing and the like to match, on a far less basis than lies in those two volumes. Those also, I expect, will be held in memory by the world, one way or other, till the world has extracted all its benefit from them. , ingenious and reading, of their sort, for all manner of inquiring souls. A little flowery island of intellect, of human ; sunlit island founded on the rocks;—which the enormous circumambient continents of mown reed-grass and floating , with their mountain-ranges of ejected stable-litter however , cannot by any means or chance submerge: nay, I expect, they will not even quite hide it, this modest little island, from the well-discerning; but will float past it towards the place appointed for them, and leave said island . Allah kereem, say the Arabs! And of the English also some still know that there is a, difference in the material of mountains!—
 
As it is this last little result, the amount of his poor and ever-interrupted literary labor, that henceforth forms the essential history of Sterling, we need not dwell at too much length on the foreign journeys, disanchorings, and of household, which occupy his few remaining years, and which are only the and accidental of this. He had now, excluding his early and more deliberate residence in the West Indies, made two flights abroad, once with his family, once without, in search of health. He had two more, in rapid succession, to make, and many more to ; and in the whole from Bayswater to the end, his family made no fewer than five complete changes of , for his sake. But these cannot be accepted as in any sense epochs in his life: the one last of his life was that of his internal change towards Literature as his work in the world; and we need not linger much on these, which are the outer accidents of that, and had no influence in modifying that.
 
Friends still hoped the unrest of that brilliant too rapid soul would with years. Nay the doctors sometimes promised, on the physical side, a like result; that, at forty-five or some mature age, the stress of disease might quit the lungs, and direct itself to other quarters of the system. But no such result was appointed for us; neither forty-five itself, nor the ameliorations promised then, were ever to be reached. Four voyages abroad, three of them without his family, in flight from death; and at home, for a like reason, five complete shiftings of abode: in such wandering manner, and not otherwise, had Sterling to continue his pilgrimage till it ended.
 
Once more I must say, his cheerfulness throughout was wonderful. A certain grimmer shade, coming gradually over him, might perhaps be noticed in the concluding years; not properly, yet the consciousness how much he needed patience; something more in his tone of wit, more and indignant occasionally in his tone of speech: but at no moment was his activity bewildered or , nor did his composure ever give way. No; both his activity and his composure he bore with him, through all weathers, to the final close; and on the whole, right manfully he walked his wild stern way towards the goal, and like a Roman wrapt his round him when he fell.—Let us glance, with brevity, at what he saw and suffered in his remaining pilgrimings and chargings; and count up what fractions of spiritual fruit he realized to us from them.
 
Calvert and he returned from Madeira in the spring of 1838. Mrs. Sterling and the family had lived in Knightsbridge with his Father's people through the winter: they now changed to Blackheath, or ultimately Hastings, and he with them, coming up to London pretty often; uncertain what was to be done for next winter. Literature went on briskly here: Blackwood had from him, besides the Onyx Ring which soon came out with due honor, assiduous almost monthly contributions in prose and verse. The series called of a was now going on; melodies, to me with something of the same disease as the Sexton's Daughter, though perhaps in a less degree, considering that the strain was in a so much higher pitch. Still better, in clear eloquent prose, the series of detached thoughts, entitled Crystals from a ; of which the set of fragments, generally a little larger in compass, called Thoughts and Images, and again those called Sayings and Essayings, 17 are properly continuations. Add to which, his friend John Mill had now charge of a Review, The London and Westminster its name; wherein Sterling's assistance, desired, wasIn spite of these wanderings, Sterling's course in life, so far as his poor life could have any course or aim beyond that of screening itself from swift death, was getting............