“I do not wish to live so far as I am personally concerned,” he said, “but I have views which I could develop—if it please God to save my life—which would be useful to science and mankind.”
Never again, however, was he to return to England. In Rome he had a second seizure. He had a great longing to reach Geneva, and a few hours after he arrived, although he appeared at first to rally, he took ill, and there passed away quietly and peacefully, not merely, as someone has it, “one of the greatest, but one of the most benevolent and amiable of men.”
They buried him in the little burying-ground at Geneva, the long procession wending its way to his last resting-place on foot. His widow erected a tablet to his memory in Westminster Abbey.
He was the greatest chemist of the age; but after all, his best memorial will abide in the memory of his fellow-men as the inventor of the Safety Lamp.
To himself his invention brought no small happiness.
“I was never more affected,” he said on one occasion, “than by a written address I received from the working colliers, when I was in the north, thanking me, on behalf of themselves and their families, for the preservation of their lives.”
His, indeed, is a career of striking brilliancy. He is like some mountain climber who climbs ever upwards. And we, looking up, seem to see him leap from one dazzling peak to another. Honours and attainments were his such as come to few men in this world, but we cannot but feel that what gave him the greatest joy in life was that he had been enabled to rescue hundreds of lives, to bring light out of darkness, and cheer and safety where before there had been uncertainty and death. It is for this that the name of Humphrey Davy will be blessed by men and women in the ages still to come.