The scheme could not be realized, and after his own return he wrote, “Yes, in a few days I will come to you in Boston, my dear friend. We will talk of scenes long gone, and renew the pleasant things of the past in sweet reflections on their memory. We will hopefully trust in the future that our friendship may grow brighter with our years, and cease, if it must cease then, only with our lives.”
In 1864 he had written, “I think we both of us have vitality enough to enjoy many happy years even in this vale of tears; but then we must occupy it together. For
“‘When true hearts lie withered,
And fond ones are gone,
Oh, who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?’”
There was a partial change in his tone four years later, when he wrote, “I think with you that we ought not to live so much asunder. Our time is now dwindled to a span; and why should we not together see the sinking sun go brightly down on the evening of our day? What a blessed thing it would be to realize that dream of Cuba I named to you when we last met!”
In 1870 Oakes determined to retire from business, and Forrest wrote to him from Macon, Georgia,—
“I am glad to hear you are about to close your toils in the ‘Old Salt House’ and give your much-worn mind and body the quiet repose they need. In this way you will receive a new and happy lease of life, enlarge your sphere of usefulness to your friends, and be a joy to yourself in giving and taking kindnesses. I look forward with a loving impatience to the end of my professional engagements this season, that I may repair to Philadelphia, there to effect a settlement of such comforting means as shall make the residue of your life glide on in ceaseless ease. Do not, I beg you, let any pride or sensitiveness stand in the way of this my purpose. It is a debt which I owe to you for the innumerable kindnesses I have experienced at your hands, and for your unwearied fidelity to all my interests.”
Oakes rejected the proposition, though keenly feeling how generous and beautiful it was. Argument and persuasion from friendly lips, however, at length overcame his repugnance, and the noble kindness—so uncommon and exemplary among friends in our hard grasping time—was finally as gratefully accepted as it was gladly bestowed. This gift was the most effective stroke of real acting that ever came from the genius of the player. Taken in connection with his traits of generous sweetness and his clouded passages of ferocious hate, it reveals a character like one of those barbaric kings who loom gigantic on the screen of the past, dusky and explosive with the ground passions of nature, but wearing a coronet of royal virtues and blazing all over with the jewelry of splendid deeds. It shows in him such a spirit in daily life as would enable him to utter on the stage with no knocking rebuke of memory the proud words of the noble Roman:—