A circle may be still complete
Although it be but small!
That summer, one of these friends, Miss Buxton, died; and long and lovingly was she remembered. This event was followed by the death of her cousin, Mrs. Briggs, which occurred in the month of September, of the same year. Mrs. Opie was with her during her last hours, and her distress and grief at this painful loss were very great. She says;—“these are the trials which make lengthened life, or long life, so undesirable; but it is the Lord, let him do that which seemeth him good.”
In the spring of 1840, writing to Miss Gurney, who was at that time in Rome, she says:—
My mind ever since your departure, has been dwelling on Peter and Paul; till I have quite convinced myself that, were I to go to Rome, my first desire would be to see the house where Peter lived, the place where he was crucified with his head downwards, and then the house where Paul lived with the soldier, and the rest of his locale: they both suffered in 66. I love Peter better than I do Paul; and I cannot read without tears those words of our Saviour, where He foretells his having to undergo a violent death. Peter, by his occasional lapses, seems to me to be the David of the disciples. * * * I am reading with delightful interest and edification a new “Memoir of George Fox,” the introduction to it is said to be written by Samuel Tuke.
The month of June, in this year, was the time appointed for the Meeting of the Anti-Slavery Convention in London; the announcement of this proposed Meeting had excited great interest in the friends of Abolition, and more than four hundred delegates assembled on the occasion. Mrs. Opie was present, and among her papers is one giving an account of the proceedings in the first day’s sitting, in which she enters at considerable length into the addresses of the various speakers, and the measures they proposed, and ends by saying:—
Thus concluded the first day’s meeting, and if the benefits resulting from it be in any proportion to the intense interest which (as I believe) it excited in all who were present, then
Millions yet unborn may bless
The meeting of that day.
The introductory remarks prefixed to her account of the second day’s sitting of the Convention are interesting, as they contain her own personal impressions of some of the actors in the scene, in short and graphic sketches, she writes thus:—