484 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. XT. 



on a low chair in the drawing-room, with an air of great pros- 

 tration, and not saying a word, he was with difficulty helped 

 into bed. The pain in his side was treated as pleurodyne, from 

 which he had frequently suffered, but next day his medical 

 attendant, Dr. J. Matthews Duncan, being apprised of his ill- 

 ness, came, and announced that inflammation of the lungs and 

 pleurisy were both present. 



Now then had come the time to which he had so long looked 

 forward. How did he meet it ? Many talk lightly of death, as 

 if to the Christian it has no terrors. Not so did he, and few 

 have so often been on the verge of the grave and come back to 

 speak of it. In 1847, he wrote to a friend in failing health :-- 

 " I am persuaded, from what I have experienced, that the world 

 fills but a small space in the thoughts of one near to death. I 

 believe, from what I have felt when brought very near to the 

 grave, that the engrossing, devouring idea is, that of one's own 

 individuality or personality, and of God's personality. The 

 prevailing feeling is that of the great Judge waiting for our soul 

 as if there were no other soul in existence, and we, in our naked 

 spirituality, without one relative, earthly friend, or well-wisher, 

 about to pass away into the darkness, and stand before God. 

 No transmutation which chemist or alchymist ever hoped for, or 

 ever realized, has equalled, or can equal, the strangeness of that 

 transformation which we shall undergo when we gasp out of 

 this life into the next. Chemistry will not help us then. ' If 

 there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.'" In 1848, a letter 

 to Mr. Daniel Macmillan contains the following passage : " I 

 have been reading lately, with great sadness, the Memorials of 

 Charles Lamb and the Life of Keats. There is something in 

 the noble brotherly love of Charles to brighten, and hallow, 

 and relieve the former ; but Keats's deathbed is the blackness 

 of midnight, unmitigated by one ray of light. 



" God keep you and me from such a deathbed ! We may 

 have physical agonies as great to endure. It is the common 

 lot. I feel that our heavenly Father can better choose for us 

 than we can for ourselves, of what we should die ; but I pray 

 our blessed Lord and Master to be with us in our last fight with 

 the last enemy, and to give us the victory. If He does, what 



