This section traces his later years from Bayswater to Madeira and Italy and then through Clifton, Falmouth, and Naples where poetic efforts accompanied recurring illness and mounting disaster, culminating in his early death, and Carlyle reshapes this final movement into a reflective meditation in which Sterling appears not merely as a subject of biography but as a serious interlocutor whose life embodies the tensions of faith, doubt, friendship, and moral integrity.
