Mr. Bernard is writing a history of the poor. I have lived much with him at Roehampton since my return, and he has read to me part of his work, which is popularly eloquent, very intelligent, and full of striking and important truths; but pray say nothing of this, for it is likely that it will appear without his name: the facts will be strong, and perhaps to some people offensive.
I have received a letter from Coleridge within the last three weeks: he writes from Malta, in good spirits, and, as usual, from the depth of his being. God bless him!—He was intended for a great man; I hope and trust he will, at some period, appear as such.
I am working very hard at this moment, and I hope soon to send you some of the fruits of my labours. I am likewise devising some plans at our Institute, for the improvement of "this generation of vipers;" but, although I am so vain as to announce them, I will not be so tedious as to detail them.
In your answer, which I hope I shall soon receive, pray give me an account of the situation of "Poole's Marsh," with regard to the Parrot,[49] for I have mentioned the soil in a paper to the Board of Agriculture, which is now in the press.
I am, my dear Poole,
Your truly affectionate friend,
H. Davy.
In this year, Davy was deprived of one of his earliest and most attached friends, after a lingering illness, during which his symptoms, by the alternations which characterise consumption, had inspired his friends with hope, only to chill them with despondency;—Gregory Watt terminated his earthly career.[50]
On the first impression which this melancholy event produced upon his feelings, Davy wrote a letter to his friend Clayfield, from which the following is an extract.
"I scarcely dare to write upon the subject—I would fain do what Hamlet does, when, in awe and horror at the ghost of his father, he attempts to call up the ludicrous feeling, but being unable to do so, he merely employs the words which are connected with it.—I would be gay, or I would write gaily, in alluding to the loss we have both sustained, but I feel that it is impossible. Poor Watt!—He ought not to have died. I could not persuade myself that he would die; and until the very moment when I was assured of his fate, I would not believe he was in any danger.
"His letters to me, only three or four months ago, were full of spirit, and spoke not of any infirmity of body, but of an increased strength of mind. Why is this in the order of Nature, that there is such a difference in the duration and destruction of her works? If the mere stone decays, it is to produce a soil which is capable of nourishing the moss and the lichen; when the moss and the lichen die and decompose, they produce a mould which becomes the bed of life to grass, and to a more exalted species of vegetables. Vegetables are the food of animals,—the less perfect animals of the more perfect; but in man, the faculties and intellect are perfected,—he rises, exists for a little while in disease and misery, and then would seem to disappear, without an end, and without producing any effect.
"We are deceived, my dear Clayfield, if we suppose that the human being who has formed himself for action, but who has been unable to act, is lost in the mass of being: there is some arrangement of things which we can never comprehend, but in which his faculties will be applied.