The ruddiest glow of young enthusiasm, of noble incipient spiritual manhood reigns over them; once more a divine Universe unveiling itself in gloom and splendor, in auroral firelight and many-tinted shadow, full of hope and full of awe, to a young melodious pious heart just arrived upon it.

Often enough the delineation has a certain flowing completeness, not to be expected from so young an artist; here and there is a decided felicity of insight; everywhere the point of view adopted is a high and noble one, and the result worked out a result to be sympathized with, and accepted so far as it will go.

Good reading still, those Papers, for the less-furnished mind,--thrice-excellent reading compared with what is usually going.
For the rest, a grand melancholy is the prevailing impression they leave;--partly as if, while the surface was so blooming and opulent, the heart of them was still vacant, sad and cold.

Here is a beautiful mirage, in the dry wilderness; but you cannot quench your thirst there! The writer's heart is indeed still too vacant, except of beautiful shadows and reflexes and resonances; and is far from joyful, though it wears commonly a smile.
In some of the Greek delineations (_The Lycian Painter_, for example), we have already noticed a strange opulence of splendor, characterizable as half-legitimate, half-meretricious,--a splendor hovering between the raffaelesque and the japannish.

What other things Sterling wrote there, I never knew; nor would he in any mood, in those later days, have told you, had you asked.