And among others on whom they called were the Wedgwood potters. In the kitchen, propped up on a bench, with his lame leg stretched out before him, sat Josiah, worn, yellow and wan, all pitted with smallpox-marks. The girl looked at the young man and asked him how he got hurt—she was only a child. Then she asked him if he could read. And she was awful glad he could, because to be sick and not to be able to read was awful!
Her father had a copy of Thomson's "Seasons" in his saddlebags. She went and got the book and gave it to Josiah, and told her father about it afterward. And when the father and daughter went away, the girl stroked the sick boy's head, and said she hoped he would get well soon. She would not have stroked the head of one of those big, burly potters; but this potter was different—he was wofully disfigured, and he was sick and lame. Woman's tenderness goes out to homely and unfortunate men—read your Victor Hugo!
And Josiah—he was speechless, dumb—his tongue paralyzed! The room swam and then teetered up and down, and everything seemed touched with a strange, wondrous light. And in both hands Josiah Wedgwood tenderly held that precious copy of James Thomson's "Seasons."
In Eighteen Hundred Sixty, just one hundred years after John Wesley visited Burslem, Gladstone came here and gave an address on the founding of the Wedgwood Memorial Institute.
Among other things said in the course of his speech was this: "Then comes the well-known smallpox, the settling of the dregs of the disease in the lower part of the leg, and the eventual amputation of the limb, rendering him lame for life. It is not often that we have such palpable occasion to record our obligations to calamity. But in the wonderful ways of Providence, that disease which came to him as a twofold scourge was probably the occasion of his subsequent excellence. It prevented him from growing up to be the active, vigorous workman, possessed of all his limbs, and knowing right well the use of them; but it put him upon considering whether, as he could not be that, he might not be something else, and something greater. It sent his mind inward; it drove him to meditate upon the laws and secrets of his art. The result was that he arrived at a perception and grasp of them which might, perhaps, have been envied, certainly have been owned, by an Athenian potter. Relentless criticism has long since torn to pieces the old legend of King Numa receiving in a cavern, from the nymph of Egeria, the laws which were to govern Rome. But no criticism can shake the record of that illness and that mutilation of the boy Josiah Wedgwood, which made a cavern of his bedroom, and an oracle of his own inquiring, searching, meditative mind."
You remember how that great and good man, Richard Maurice Bucke, once said, "After I had lost my feet in the Rocky Mountain avalanche, I lay for six weeks in a cabin, and having plenty of time to think it over, I concluded that, now my feet were gone, I surely could no longer depend upon them, so I must use my head." And he did.
The loss of an arm in a sawmill was the pivotal point that gave us one of the best and strongest lawyers in Western New York. And heaven knows we need good lawyers: the other kind are so plentiful!
Gladstone thought it was smallpox that drove Josiah Wedgwood to books and art. But other men have had the smallpox—bless me!—and they never acquired much else.
Josiah kept Thomson's "Seasons" three months, and then returned it to Sarah Wedgwood, with a letter addressing her as "Dear Cousin." You will find it set down in most of the encyclopedias that she was his cousin, but this seems to be because writers of encyclopedias are literalists, and lovers are poets.