Between these two young men there grew a most ardent and lasting friendship; lasting because it had the only sure foundation, moral and mental worth. They were always together. They visited the neighboring mines and mountains, and came home with their pockets filled with minerals.
The brilliant Gregory died at twenty-eight, but Davy lived to show the fruits of one of the most beautiful things in life, the affinity of two noble and intellectual souls, with similar tastes and aspirations. This death was a great loss to Humphrey. He wrote to a friend: "Poor Watt! He ought not to have died. I could not persuade myself that he would die: and until the very moment when I was assured of his fate, I would not believe he was in any danger.
"His letters to me only three or four months ago were full of spirit, and spoke not of any infirmity of body, but of an increased strength of mind. Why is this in the order of nature, that there is such a difference in the duration and destruction of her works? If the mere stone decays, it is to produce a soil which is capable of nourishing the moss and the lichen; when the moss and the lichen die, and decompose, they produce a mould, which becomes the bed of life to grasses, and to more exalted species of vegetables. Vegetables are the food of animals; the less perfect animals of the more perfect; but in man the faculties and intellect are perfected. He rises, exists for a little while in disease and misery; and then would seem to disappear, without an end, and without producing any effect.
"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.... Gregory was a noble fellow, and would have been a great man. Oh! there was no reason for his dying--he ought not to have died."
This death broke the spirit of James Watt, the father, who ever after kept beside him, in the attic at Heathfield, the little, old-fashioned hair trunk of his beloved Gregory, full of his school-books, letters, and childish toys. It stands to-day, where it did eighty years ago, beside the mouldering beams of the sculpture machine. That life is not short, however few the years, which leaves such an undying influence and such beautiful memories.