Man of letters, poet, and religious thinker, John Sterling had a special gift for literary friendships, and he expressed that gift powerfully toward the Carlyles.  In the conclusion of his Life of John Sterling (1851), Thomas writes, "Here, visible to myself, for some while, was a brilliant human presence, distinguishable, honourable and lovable amid the dim common populations; among the million little beautiful, once more a beautiful human soul: whom I, among others, recognised and lovingly walked with, while the years and the hours were."  Sterling's death from consumption left a general sense of promise unfulfilled, yet if his life can be detached from the pervasive Victorian sense of valediction, it reveals a complex and more rewarding intellectual pilgrimage. 
 
John Sterling was born in 1806 at Kames Castle, on the Isle of Bute, where his father, Edward,  a retired captain of militia, had taken up farming.  In 1809 the family moved to the south of Wales while the father cultivated various connections, finally establishing a lifelong association with the Times in London, first as a leader-writer, and eventually as co-proprietor.  Edward Sterling (1773-1847) and his wife Hester Coningham Sterling (1783-1843) were closely linked with the Carlyles in their own right, as was John's elder brother, Col. Anthony Sterling (1805-1871).  All lived in Knightsbridge in London after 1820.  John's poor health prevented him attending public school, but he studied at Greenwich School and Christ's Hospital before attending Glasgow University, 1822-24, and finally Trinity College, Cambridge in 1824. 

At Cambridge Sterling quickly distinguished himself in debates at the Union Society, becoming its president in 1827, and among the fledgling Cambridge Apostles.  Torn between careers in law, politics, the church, and literature, Sterling migrated to Trinity Hall in 1826 and then back to London.  With F. D. Maurice he founded the Metropolitan Quarterly Magazine, styled after the great journals of the day, and within a few years assumed ownership and control of the new periodical the Athenaeum.    At the London Debating Society he met John Stuart Mill who recalls how Sterling and Maurice represented "a second Liberal and even Radical party, on totally different grounds from Benthamism and vehemently opposed to it; bringing into these discussions the general doctrines and modes of thought of the European reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century" (Autobiography, 128).  The main intellectual influence on Sterling at this time was Samuel Taylor Coleridge whom he met at Highgate and whose theological writings Sterling later inherited as joint executor along with his tutor from Trinity, Julius Charles Hare. 
 
Sterling became devoted to Coleridge, serving as disciple and amanuensis at a time when both were interested alike in German fiction and the higher criticism.  J. C. Hare promoted the friendship and owned himself perhaps the finest library of German authors in England.  This constellation of talent could only have been envied by Carlyle who was then at work on his own translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1824), Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825), and German Romance (1827).  And like Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, Sterling wrote an autobiographical novel of crisis called Arthur Coningsby (1833) set in the French Revolution.  Like his leading character Sterling suffered serious loss of political idealism in the debacle ensuing from his support of an abortive campaign to free Spain from tyrannical rule.  The Spanish affair involved many of Sterling's Cambridge friends, Richard Chenevix Trench, J. W. Blakesley, Charles Buller, Arthur Henry Hallam, Alfred Tennyson, John Mitchell Kemble, and Charles Barton.  Late in 1830 Sterling married  Susannah Barton whose family included the influential Bordeaux wine merchants.  He planned to return to Cambridge, take his degree, and then study in Germany, but that winter his health suffered its first serious setback.  When he recovered, he accepted a proposal to seek a better climate in the West Indies where his uncle owned a plantation.

Within weeks of their arrival in St. Vincent, the plantation was battered by a hurricane, and two months later their first child was born.  Sterling corresponded with his father's newspaper about the condition of slaves and slave-owners and experimented with various forms of education.  Returning to London a year later, he hoped to recruit a schoolmaster for the plantation but was persuaded by Coleridge to renew his German studies in Bonn with A. W. Schlegel.  There he met J. C. Hare who had left his fellowship in Cambridge and was traveling the continent before assuming the family living at Herstmonceux in Sussex.  Hare offered Sterling his curacy, and Sterling accepted, despite his uncertain health.  He was ordained Deacon in 1834 and seems always to have considered the clergy to be what Coleridge called "a clerisy," a distinction Carlyle may not have accepted.  For over a year Sterling served a parish of 1400 people until doctors in London warned him against the dangers of continuing.  On one of these visits to London in 1835 he first met Thomas Carlyle in Mill's office.  Hoping for an appointment to the English chaplaincy in Rome or as an inspector of schools in the West Indies, Sterling was forced by his health to move with his family to Bordeaux where for some time he became one of the most celebrated contributors of poetry and prose to Blackwood's Magazine.  This attachment continued even after a cholera outbreak drove him to return to London, leave his family with his parents, and spend the winter in Madeira.
 
Sterling's friendship and correspondence with the Carlyles were well-established by this time, and Thomas figures conspicuously in Sterling's novella, The Onyx Ring, published serially in Blackwood's late in 1838 and reissued posthumously in Boston as a book.  Here Sterling attempts to reconcile the conflicting claims of Carlyle, Goethe, Hare, Coleridge, and others over his evolving career.  By wearing the onyx ring this tale's protagonist is permitted to spend a week inside the being of another soul and thereby to reflect on human existence from a variety of perspectives.  In the persona of a poet the protagonist encounters the Carlyle-figure and is reproached for idleness and the absence of earnest striving.  Yet Sterling's commitment to poetry survived Carlyle's criticism.  His poems were collected by Moxon in 1839, praised by Henry Nelson Coleridge in the Quarterly Review, and pirated in America three years later despite Emerson's attempt to prepare an authorized edition.  His verse satire, The Election, was published by Murray and reviewed by Mill who called it the best of its kind since Byron.  Like Coleridge, Sterling wanted to combine religion and art, faith and the imagination, historical Christianity and the modern experiment.  And he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Carlyle to pursue such a synthesis.
 
In the mid-1830s Mill assumed editorship of the London and Westminster Review and welcomed Sterling's articles and poetry.  They toured together in Rome in 1838 before Sterling's return to England and residence in Clifton where his friends included the Stracheys, Dr. John Addington Symonds, and Francis W. Newman.  In October 1839 Mill published Sterling's splendid controversial review article on Carlyle.  Thomas almost blushed: "My friend, what a notion you have got of me!" he wrote Sterling.  "I will say there has no man in these Islands been so reviewed in my time; it is the most magnanimous eulogy I ever knew one man utter of another man whom he knew face to face" (Letters 11:192).  Later Carlyle called it "the first generous human recognition, expressed with heroic emphasis, and clear conviction visible amid its fiery exaggeration, that one's poor battle in this world is not quite a mad and futile, that it is perhaps a worthy and manful one, which will come to something yet:  this fact is a memorable one in every history; and for me Sterling, often enough the stiff gainsayer in our private communings, was the doer of this" (Life of Sterling, 248-49).  In spite of his praises, Carlyle may not have grasped the complex purposes of this essay, either public or private.  Privately Sterling hoped to win Carlyle to a juster understanding and acceptance of Coleridge, an understanding Mill was himself pursuing in the composition of his own essay on Coleridge at just this time.  Publicly Sterling hoped through the London and Westminster Review to win a new audience for his friend Carlyle, who refused to be called a radical just as he shuddered to be thought a Coleridgean, though he was in fact a little of each.  An essay by a former clergyman in a radical journal defending the increasingly famous critic of the follies of Christendom was bound to undermine Sterling's standing in the church.  Additional doubts arose in some circles with the formation of the Sterling Club, an association of literary men that met for dinner monthly in London to celebrate the spirit of friendship embodied by John Sterling.  The Club survived Sterling's death and ignited suspicions of freethinking and impiety among religious critics at about the time Carlyle published his Life of John Sterling (1851).
 
In the aftermath of his Carlyle article, Sterling published several installments of his translation of Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit in Blackwood's and contributed to Maurice's Educational Magazine, the latter suggesting that his estrangement from friends in the church was by no means absolute.  He dedicated his collection of poems late in 1839 to his friend and mentor J. C. Hare, soon to become Archdeacon, and began composing a verse drama based on the life and death of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford two hundred years earlier.  At this time, too, Sterling began corresponding with Ralph Waldo Emerson to whom he later dedicated Strafford (1843).  The two enjoyed an instant affinity, both having left the clergy and embarked on a life of letters.
 
A hemorrhage in his lungs drove Sterling from Clifton to Falmouth early in 1840 to await a ship to Madeira.  The climate there, both intellectual and meteorological, proved suitable for an extended stay, and he was quickly befriended by the influential Quaker family of Barclay and Caroline Fox.  John Stuart Mill attended his dying brother there, and Derwent Coleridge ran a school nearby.  Increasingly Sterling turned away from theological controversy toward poetry.  In the spring of 1841 he bought a house in Falmouth and moved his family there.  He lectured to acclaim at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, founded a decade earlier by the Fox family.   At the beginning of 1842 his friend from Madeira J. M. Calvert died in Falmouth, and at about the same time came news that Sterling's investments in an American canal company had been lost.  Hoping to supplement his friend's literary income, Carlyle solicited essays from Sterling for Forster's Foreign Quarterly Review.  When Sterling returned from a journey to Malta and Italy midyear, he composed an essay on Tennyson's Poems (1842) for Lockhart's Quarterly Review, one of the most influential early appreciations of that poet. 
 
In early 1843 Sterling suffered a relapse while his mother, too, fell gravely ill.  On Good Friday his daughter was born in Falmouth, but Sterling's wife suffered complications from the delivery.  News arrived of his mother's death on Easter Sunday in London, and a short time later his wife also perished.  Sterling was devastated.  In the months that followed with the help of the Maurices he arranged schooling for his children in London and to be closer moved from Falmouth to the Isle of Wight where he supervised rebuilding of a house at Hillside near Ventnor.  He continued writing his ottava rima tale on Coeur-de-Lion, to which Carlyle responded, "if a man would write in metre, this sure enough, was the way to try doing it" (Life 321).  In January 1844 Sterling appears to have proposed marriage to Caroline Fox in Falmouth, and the bright, lively young woman declined, influenced by her parents' concerns about Sterling's health and his situation outside the Quaker fellowship.  This, too, deadened Sterling's spirits in his long last winter at Hillside.  His bleeding worsened in April and through the summer he wrote a series of powerful letters to his first-born son in London.  Carlyle describes their last visit together in London and gives examples of Sterling's letters from these final months.  Attended by Mrs. Maurice and his own brother, Anthony, Sterling died in the night of 18 September 1844.  Carlyle's tribute seven years later at the end of his Life of John Sterling (1851) is still extraordinarily moving.  He was not alone in contemplating such a tribute of friendship.  Mill and Emerson both projected biographies, and Hare prefixed a long, defensive Memoir to the first volume of his collection of Sterling's Essays and Tales (2v, 1848).  The so-called religious press had its own objections to Sterling's liberal tendencies, objections catalyzed by the scandalous suggestion that dinners of the Sterling Cub omitted the speaking of grace. 
 
Sterling suffered the curious fate of getting so much exposure in his biographies that readers have subsequently assumed his story was told--told even to excess.  Yet these were polemical biographies.  Carlyle's portrait of the brave liberal defying the bounds of orthodox Christian speculation and perishing in his quest for something better, or Hare's of the Faustian soul saved in the end by his acceptance of grace, neither can fully satisfy a modern reader.   After Henry James, Sr., met the London literati in the 1840s, he remarked:
 
"Mr Mill was the best of the lot excepting Sterling, who was the truest man I ever met.  Sterling was a perfectly delightful man, just the antipodes of Carlyle and the only man Carlyle had any sincere attachment to.  Sterling was the only man in England who seemed like an American in spirit and manners.  He talked freely, was jocund, and was dying in perfect confidence."
 
And in his Autobiography (1873) John Stuart Mill records this appraisal of Sterling.
 
"With Sterling I soon became very intimate, and was more attached to him than I have ever been to any other man.  He was indeed one of the most loveable of men.  His frank, cordial, affectionate and expansive character; a love of truth alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest; a generous and ardent nature which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a combination of qualities as attractive to me, as to all others who knew him as well as I did.  With his open mind and heart, he found no difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which as yet divided our opinions."
 
Sterling links the age of Coleridge with that of Carlyle and Mill.  By his commitment to poetry and theology he embodies the idea of a Coleridgean clerisy in times of increasing contentiousness.  That he could crystalize friendships across such a spectrum of opinion remains a vivid testimony to the powers of his mind, imagination, and character.


Selective Bibliography in chronological order:
 
J. C. Hare, "Sketch of the author's life," Essays and Tales by John Sterling, 2 vols. (1848).
T. Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (1851).
W. Coningham, ed., Twelve Letters Originally Printed for Private Circulation (1851).
J. S. Mill, Autobiography (1873).
H. Pym, ed., Memories of Old Friends: Being Extracts from the Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox, 3rd edn, 2 vols. (1882).
F. Maurice, ed., The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice Chiefly Told in His Own Letters, 3rd edn, 2 vols. (1884).
M. Trench, ed., Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop: Letters and Memorials (1888).
J. R. Dasent, ed., Letters from John Sterling to George Webbe Dasent, 1838-1844 (1914).
R. W. Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. R. L. Rusk (1939).
A. K. Tuell, John Sterling: Representative Victorian (1941).
J. S. Mill, The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill: 1812-1848, ed. F. E. Mineka (1963).
T. and J. W. Carlyle, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke-Edinburgh edn, ed C. R. Sanders, C. Ryals, K. J. Fielding, et al. (1970- ).
P. Allen, The Cambridge Apostles: the Early Years (1978).
R. L. Brett, ed., Barclay Fox's Journal (1979).
N. M. Distad, Guessing at Truth: the Life of Julius Charles Hare (1979).
E. W. Nye, "Carlyle and John Sterling."  Papers of the Carlyle Society (Edinburgh), n.s. 1 (1988): 1-17.
E. W. Nye, "British Romantic Novelists, 1789-1832: John Sterling."  Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Bradford K. Mudge (1992) 116: 343-50.
W. C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914 (1998).
E. W. Nye, "John Sterling." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed.C. Matthew, B. Harrison, et al. (2004- ).
E. W. Nye, "John Sterling." Carlyle Enclyclopedia, ed. Mark Cumming (2004).
E. W. Nye, John Kemble�s Gibraltar Journal: The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles 1830�1831 (2015).