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.
True, he had his "religion" to seek, and painfully shape together for himself, out of the abysses of conflicting disbelief and sham-belief and bedlam delusion, now filling the world, as all men of reflection have; and in this respect too,--more especially as his lot in the battle appointed for us all was, if you can understand it, victory and not defeat,--he is an expressive emblem of his time, and an instruction and possession to his contemporaries.

For, I say, it is by no means as a vanquished _doubter_ that he figures in the memory of those who knew him; but rather as a victorious _believer_, and under great difficulties a victorious doer.

An example to us all, not of lamed misery, helpless spiritual bewilderment and sprawling despair, or any kind of _drownage_ in the foul welter of our so-called religious or other controversies and confusions; but of a swift and valiant vanquisher of all these; a noble asserter of himself, as worker and speaker, in spite of all these.
Continually, so far as he went, he was a teacher, by act and word, of hope, clearness, activity, veracity, and human courage and nobleness: the preacher of a good gospel to all men, not of a bad to any man.