not to be afraid of the warm blood and beating pulse of humanity; to remember that the angel in the house is, as the least sensuous of poets reminds

us

'An angel, but a woman too.'

Fraser's Magazine,

October, 1856.

CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING.

THE domain of political economy is not unlimited; the laws of supply and demand are not the only or the strongest forces at work in nature. Here is a man whom the world would have been well content to leave quiet in his early grave by the sea-shore in the sweetest of English islands; to leave him there to the soft melodies of the warm wind and the gentle rain, and the pious visits now and then of those who knew and loved him when his eye was bright and his voice eloquent with sparkling thoughts and warm affections. He had done nothing that the public cared for; had left no traces on the sands of Time that the next tide would not have effaced. But he lived amongst men who write books, amongst some of the very best of such; and two of the foremost of them loved him so well that they could not let his memory die,-thought that the positive actual results

of his life made known to the public were but faint indications of the power that lay in him though sorely foiled and baffled, and that he in his individual spiritual progress typified better than most the struggle that the age is passing through, its processes and its results. But the two men, though united in affection for Sterling, were so different in other respects, that the memorial raised by the one could scarcely fail to be unsatisfactory to the other. Archdeacon Hare, the author of the earlier biography, is a man of encyclopædic knowledge,—a profound classical scholar, the most learned and philosophical of modern English theologians, at once accurate and wide in his acquaintance with European history and literature. And this large survey of the forms under which the men of the past have thought and acted has not led in him to an indifference to all forms, but rather to a keener sense of the organic vitality of forms, especially of national institutions, whether civil or ecclesiastical polities, states or churches. Moreover, apart from this general characteristic, which would lead to an intellectual and practical reverence for the institutions of his own land, and a hesitating caution in the introduction of constitutional changes, Mr. Hare is an English churchman of no ordinary cast. He has passed from the region of traditional

belief, has skirted the bogs and quicksands of doubt and disbelief, and has found firm footing where alone it seems possible, in a revelation whose letter is coloured by the human media through which it has passed, and in a faith whose highest mysteries are not only harmonious with but necessary complements to the truths of reason. The English Church is to him the purest embodiment of his religious idea, as the English constitution was to him, in common with Niebuhr, Coleridge and other great thinkers, of the idea of a state. Such a man could not write a life like Sterling's without feeling that his relation to Christianity and the Church was the great fact for him as for all of us; and that the change in him, from hearty acceptance of Christian doctrine and church organization to a rejection of the former and something very like contempt for the latter, needed explanation. That explanation he has sought in the overthrow of the balance of Sterling's life through repeated attacks of illness, which shut him out from practical duties, and threw him entirely upon speculation, thereby disproportionately developing the negative side of him, already too strong from early defects of education: and few persons will, we should think, be found to deny Mr. Hare's general position, that the pursuit of speculative philosophy as the

business of life has this tendency; Mr. Carlyle, we should have supposed, least of all men. But a special cause interferes with Mr. Carlyle's recognition of the principle as applicable to Sterling. Christianity as understood commonly, perhaps everywhere except, it may be, at Weimar and Chelsea, and church formulas certainly as understood everywhere, he is in the habit of classing under a category which in his hands has become an extensive one-that of shams. He calls them by various forcible but ugly names,—as "old clothes," "spectral inanities,"" gibbering phantoms," or, with plainer meaning, "huge unveracities and unrealities." That Sterling at any time of his life accepted these for "eternal verities" he cannot consider a step from the "no" to the "yes," nor their repudiation as a step backwards from the "yes" to the "no." Let him speak for himself. He is commenting on Sterling's entry into orders as Mr Hare's curate at Hurstmonceaux.

"Concerning this attempt of Sterling's to find sanctuary in the old Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment in such manner, there will at present be many opinions; and mine must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere pitying condemnation of it, as a rash, false, unwise and unpermitted step. Nay, among the evil lessons of his Time to poor Sterling I cannot but account this the worst; properly indeed, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn apology and consecration, of all the evil lessons that were in it to him. Alas, if we did remember the divine and awful nature of God's Truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did