Chambers left Haverhill, never to return to it, in the year 1790. In peregrinating the country, which he did in every change of sky, through storms, and through snow, or whatever might betide, he was often supported entirely by the spontaneous benevolence of those who witnessed his wanderings. In his verses on a snow-storm, he says:—
This vile raiment hangs in tatters;
No warm garment to defend:
O’er my flesh the chill snow scatters;
No snug hut!—no social friend!
About four years before his death, while sojourning in Woodbridge, sleeping in a miserable hut on the barrack ground, and daily wandering about the town, with every visible mark of misery to distress the eye, his condition became a libel upon the feelings of the inhabitants of the place; a few gentlemen determined he should no longer wander in such a state of wretchedness, offered to clothe and cleanse him, and provide a comfortable room, bed, &c. and a person to shave him and wash for him; and they threatened, if he would not comply, to take him home to where he belonged.
His aversion to a poor-house amounted to horror: he expresses somewhat to that effect in one of his poems——
’Mongst Belial’s sons of contention and strife,
To breathe out the transient remains of my life!
This dread operated in behalf of those who desired to assist him. His wretched hovel was emptied, its miserable accumulations were consigned to the flames, and he was put into a new habitation, clothed from head to foot, and so metamorphosed, that but few knew him at first sight. A bedstead and bedding, a chair, table, and necessary crockery were provided for his comfort, but the poor creature was often heard to exclaim, of the cleansing and burning, that “it was the worst day’s work he ever met with.” After a few short weeks he left this home, and a shilling a week allowed him by a gentleman, besides some weekly pence, donations from ladies in the town, for a life of wandering privation and, at times, of absolute want, until the closing scene of his weary pilgrimage. He breathed his last on the 4th of January, 1827, in an unoccupied farm-house belonging to Mr. Thurston of Stradbroke, where he had been permitted the use of two rooms. Within a few days before, he had been as well as usual, but he suddenly became ill, and had the attention of two women, neighbours, who provided him warm gruel, and a few things his situation required. Some one had given him a warm blanket, and when he died there was food in the house, with tenpence halfpenny in money, a few scraps of poetry, and a bushel of wheat which he had gleaned in the harvest. A decent coffin and shroud were provided, and he was buried in Stradbrook churchyard.[99]
Chambers was literally one of the poor at all times; and hence his annals are short and simple. Disregard of personal appearance was natural to his poverty-stricken circumstances and melancholy disposition; for the wheel of his fortune was fixed by habit, as by a nail in a sure place, to constant indigence. Neglected in his youth, and without fixed employment, he brooded throughout life on his hopeless condition, without a friend of his own rank who could participate in his sorrows. He was a lonely man, and a wanderer, who had neither act nor part in the common ways of the world.
[99] The Ipswich Journal, January 31, 1827.