Steady courage is needed on the Poetic course,as on all courses!--Shortly after this Publication,in the beginning of 1842,poor Calvert,long a hopeless sufferer,was delivered by death:Sterling's faithful fellow-pilgrim could no more attend him in his wayfarings through this world.The weary and heavy-laden man had borne his burden well.Sterling says of him to Hare:"Since I wrote last,Ihave lost Calvert;the man with whom,of all others,I have been during late years the most intimate.Simplicity,benevolence,practical good sense and moral earnestness were his great unfailing characteristics;and no man,I believe,ever possessed them more entirely.His illness had latterly so prostrated him,both in mind and body,that those who most loved him were most anxious for his departure."There was something touching in this exit;in the quenching of so kind and bright a little life under the dark billows of death.To me he left a curious old Print of James Nayler the Quaker,which I still affectionately preserve.
Sterling,from this greater distance,came perhaps rather seldomer to London;but we saw him still at moderate intervals;and,through his family here and other direct and indirect channels,were kept in lively communication with him.Literature was still his constant pursuit;and,with encouragement or without,Poetic composition his chosen department therein.On the ill success of _The Election_,or any ill success with the world,nobody ever heard him utter the least murmur;condolence upon that or any such subject might have been a questionable operation,by no means called for!Nay,my own approval,higher than this of the world,had been languid,by no means enthusiastic.But our valiant friend took all quietly;and was not to be repulsed from his Poetics either by the world's coldness or by mine;he labored at his _Strafford_;--determined to labor,in all ways,till he felt the end of his tether in this direction.
He sometimes spoke,with a certain zeal,of my starting a Periodical:
Why not lift up some kind of war-flag against the obese platitudes,and sickly superstitious aperies and impostures of the time?But Ihad to answer,"Who will join it,my friend?"He seemed to say,"I,for one;"and there was occasionally a transient temptation in the thought,but transient only.No fighting regiment,with the smallest attempt towards drill,co-operation,commissariat,or the like unspeakable advantages,could be raised in Sterling's time or mine;which truly,to honest fighters,is a rather grievous want.Agrievous,but not quite a fatal one.For,failing this,failing all things and all men,there remains the solitary battle (and were it by the poorest weapon,the tongue only,or were it even by wise abstinence and silence and without any weapon),such as each man for himself can wage while he has life:an indubitable and infinitely comfortable fact for every man!Said battle shaped itself for Sterling,as we have long since seen,chiefly in the poetic form,in the singing or hymning rather than the speaking form;and in that he was cheerfully assiduous according to his light.The unfortunate _Strafford_is far on towards completion;a _Coeur-de-Lion_,of which we shall hear farther,"_Coeur-de-Lion_,greatly the best of all his Poems,"unluckily not completed,and still unpublished,already hangs in the wind.
