to it by evident considerations, one of which ought to be especially
sacred to me, I decide to fling down on paper some outline of what my
recollections and reflections contain in reference to this most
friendly, bright and beautiful human soul; who walked with me for a
season in this world, and remains to me very memorable while I
continue in it. Gradually, if facts simple enough in themselves can
be narrated as they came to pass, it will be seen what kind of man
this was; to what extent condemnable for imaginary heresy and other
crimes, to what extent laudable and lovable for noble manful
_orthodoxy_ and other virtues;--and whether the lesson his life had to
teach us is not much the reverse of what the Religious Newspapers
hitherto educe from it.

Certainly it was not as a "sceptic" that you could define him,
whatever his definition might be. Belief, not doubt, attended him at
all points of his progress; rather a tendency to too hasty and
headlong belief. Of all men he was the least prone to what you could
call scepticism: diseased self-listenings, self-questionings,
impotently painful dubitations, all this fatal nosology of spiritual
maladies, so rife in our day, was eminently foreign to him. Quite on
the other side lay Sterling's faults, such as they were. In fact, you
could observe, in spite of his sleepless intellectual vivacity, he was
not properly a thinker at all; his faculties were of the active, not
of the passive or contemplative sort. A brilliant _improvisatore_;
rapid in thought, in word and in act; everywhere the promptest and
least hesitating of men. I likened him often, in my banterings, to
sheet-lightning; and reproachfully prayed that he would concentrate
himself into a bolt, and rive the mountain-barriers for us, instead of
merely playing on them and irradiating them.