A man of letters whose career began toward the end of the Romantic period, John Sterling is relatively unknown today. How this obscurity came to be is one of the puzzles of literary history. Born into the best society, eminent among the brightest of his generation at Cambridge University, befriended early by John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle, Sterling demonstrated his talent successfully in virtually every literary mode. His poetry was trumpeted with extravagance by John Wilson in Blackwood's Magazine and solicited for publication in America by Ralph Waldo Emerson. His verse tragedy, Strafford (1843), was well reviewed by Margaret Fuller and G. H. Lewes. His aphorisms--really prose poems--and essays filled the pages of the most prominent journals of his day. His contemporaries cherished their communications with him and carefully preserved his letters. Selections from his correspondence, richly laced through with literary observations, were published after his death from...