THE LOSS OF FRIENDS. 375 "You will understand this better twenty and four years hence, and also find out that there is something to a living man darker than darkness, more lonely than loneliness, more silent than silence. What is that? The space in our eye, our ear, and our mind, which the presence of a friend once filled, and which imagination itself cannot now fill. Infinite space, invisible, inaudible, dimensionless, is not more inapprehensible than that remembered range in which, to us, he lived, moved, and had a being. Absent from the body,' is a far different separation from that which the earth's diameter interposes between two breathing conscious beings, each present with himself and contemporary with the other, but as utterly beyond personal communication as the living with the dead, or the dwellers in the dust, each resting in his bed, side by side. I must not rhapsodize any more. We two yet can meet and part; and how much of life's acting and suffering these two monosyllables comprehend! I have only another to add; and that is that I am, very sincerely, your Friend." On the 29th Mr. Roberts was interred at Church-Anston. Montgomery attended the funeral a sincere as well as a ceremonial mourner; his feelings, after reaching home, being embodied in the following lines: "We will remember thee in love: Thy race is run — thy work is done; Where sin, and toil, and suffering cease; Meanwhile, in hope to meet above, When these with us no more shall be, In love we will remember thee." On opening the will of the deceased, although it did not comprise any formal testamentary bequest to any of his friends, it contained a pencilled memorandum to the effect, that the executor (Samuel Roberts, Jun.) should give some memento of his late father's esteem to the poet: "a wish, which we happen to know," says Mr. Holland, "was not less cheerfully than promptly and liberally realized by a present of one hundred guineas." CHAPTER XX. EXTINCTION OF THE IRIS LIFE OF KEATS- SHELLEY-MISSIONARY JUBILEE-TRACT SOCIETY JUBILEE - SICKNESS — POEMS — RECOVERY -VISIT ΤΟ FULNECK CELEBRATION OF HIS BIRTH-DAY-TREEPLANTING AT THE MOUNT-VISIT TO BUXTON. IN September, 1848, the Iris, which Montgomery established fifty-four years before, and which at one period was the only newspaper in Sheffield, closed its existence. A few weeks later, the Sheffield Mercury, with which Mr. Holland had been connected for fifteen years, merged itself into a new sheet, and thus an interesting link between the old editor and the younger, his future biographer, was broken. "Every Saturday afternoon," Mr. Holland tells us, "he took care to be found in his room at the Music Hall, because at 4 o'clock, to a minute, the beloved and venerable bard uniformly made his appearance, gliding down the pas sage as quietly as a ghost; and after sitting and chatting for half an hour, carried off with him the newspaper." "And so this is the last Sheffield Mercury we are to have, and you are no longer Mr. Editor," said Montgomery, on his last visit to this old haunt; "I confess I am sorry on every account." "So the march of intellect' leaves behind first one and then another, in succession," answered his friend; "its hard hoof, which, as you once intimated, trampled on you so sternly nearly thirty years ago, has now trodden me down." "You must come up to The Mount, and let us talk over these momentous changes;" an invitation which needed no renewal, for Mr. Holland's society and friendship now formed almost a daily part of Montgomery's social enjoy ment. A day or two after, we find him at The Mount, bringing the Life of Keats by Milnes, for the poet's perusal. "Glad to see it," answered Montgomery, "though I feel loth just now to be drawn away from a very interesting subject the journal of the founder of the Quakers, an extraordinary book, which I wonder I never read before. I can understand the religion of George Fox better than the poetry of Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Members of the Society of Friends-to their honor be it spoken were among the earliest advocates for the emancipation - of slaves." "Yes," answered Mr. Holland, "but it is curious to perceive that, even among them, the principle, in its practical application at least, was one of growth; for you will find George Fox, on his visit to the West Indies, in 1671, telling the planters that, with respect to their 'negroes or blacks, they should endeavor to train them up in the fear of God; as well them that were bought with their money, as them that were born in their families, that all might come to the knowledge of the Lord. I desired them also,' he adds, 'that they would cause their overseers to deal mildly and gently with their negroes, and not use cruelty towards them, as the manner of some hath been, and is; and that after certain years of servitude they would make them free.' I do not know how the thing strikes you, but to me it appears that a good deal of the reproach which, THE USE OF A DEVIL. 379 in connection with current reports of the growth and atrocities of the slave trade as now clandestinely carried on, we so constantly find to be cast upon the party who paid the twenty millions of British money for emancipation, originated with those who are at best but half-hearted abolitionists themselves." "I am afraid there is too much truth in your remark," rejoined Montgomery. "One does not always catch a new idea at a public meeting; but there was to me something of novelty in an anecdote told by one of the speakers at the Wesleyan Missionary Meeting on Monday night :Two British sailors were engaged in assisting at the debarkation of a cargo of negroes from a captured slaver; on seeing the shocking condition of the poor creatures as they were brought up, and the sinister looks of the captain, who was thus disappointed of his prey-Jack,' exclaimed one of the sailors to his companion, 'the devil will be sure to have that fellow.' 'Dost thou really think so?' was the reply of his shipmate. To be sure he will; or else what's the use of having a devil?' This story," proceeded Montgomery, "reminded me of one which I heard soon after I came to Sheffield; there appeared in some of the meetings of the Jacobins, as they were at that time called, an elderly man of the name of Gibbs; he was regarded, and no doubt correctly, by Mr. Gales and others, as a Government spy, for he had played that part in America during the War of Independence. Franklin, who knew him, is said to have exclaimed, 'If God had not made a hell, he ought to make one for the punishment of such miscreants as Gibbs! This observation savors somewhat of profanity; but it is remarkable that the philosophic statesman and the rude sailor were alike horrified at atrocities, for which they saw no competent retribution in this world." |