Page:Memoir and poems of Phillis Wheatley, a native African and a slave.djvu/35

Rh nobles of Britain, was now numbering the last hours of life in a state of the most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of squalid poverty!

Little more remains to be told. It is probable (as frequently happens when the constitution has long borne up against disease) that the thread of life, attenuated by suffering, at last snapped suddenly; for the friends of Phillis, who had visited her in her sickness, knew not of her death. Peters did not see fit to acquaint them with the event, or to notify them of her interment. A grand-niece of Phillis's benefactress, passing up Court Street, met the funeral of an adult and a child. A bystander informed her they were bearing Phillis Wheatley to that silent mansion 'where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.'

They laid her away in her solitary grave, without a stone to tell that one so good and so gifted sleeps beneath; and the waters of oblivion are rapidly erasing her name from the sands of time. We would that her memory were engraven upon the heart of the young and the gifted, who are striving for a niche in the temple of fame. We think, gentle reader, she is as worthy of a place in your thoughts, as the heroines of the thousand tales dressed out to beguile your fancy. Remember, that though the children of men regard feature 3*