You must not live much longer without giving to all men the proof of power which those who know you feel in admiration. Perhaps, at a distance from the applauding and censuring murmurs of the world, you will be best able to execute those great works which are justly expected from you; you are to be the historian of the philosophy of feeling. Do not in any way dissipate your noble nature. Do not give up your birthright. May you soon recover perfect health, the health of strength and happiness! may you soon return to us confirmed in all the powers essential to the exertion of genius! You were born for your country, and your native land must be the scene of your activity. I shall expect the time when your spirit, bursting through the clouds of ill-health, will appear to all men, not as an uncertain and brilliant flame, but as a fair and permanent light, fixed, though constantly in motion, as a sun which gives its fire not only to its attendant planets, but which sends beams from all its parts into all worlds. May blessings attend you, my dear friend! Do not forget me; we live for different ends and with different habits and pursuits, but our feelings with regard to each other have, I believe, never altered. They must continue; they can have no natural death. I trust they can never be destroyed by fortune, chance, or accident. H. DAVY. In October Davy thus wrote to a friend on the death of Gregory Watt, the son of James Watt: 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. The caterpillar, in being converted into an inert scaly mass, does not appear to be fitting itself for an inhabitant of the air, and can have no consciousness of the brilliancy of its future being. We are masters of the earth, but perhaps we are the slaves of some great but unknown beings. The fly that we crush with our finger or feed with our viands, has no knowledge of man and no consciousness of his superiority. We suppose that we are acquainted with matter and with all its elements, and yet we cannot even guess at the cause of electricity or explain the laws of the formation of the stones which fall from meteors. There may be beings--thinking beings--near us, surrounding us, which we do not perceive, which we can never imagine. We know very little, but, in my opinion, we know enough to hope for the immortality--the _individual immortality_--_of the better part of man_.