The volume has passed through several English and American editions, and is to be found in all first-class libraries in the country.  Mrs. Wheatley sickened, and grieved daily after Phillis.  A picture of her little ward, sent from England, adorned her bedroom; and she pointed it out to visiting friends with all the sincere pride of a mother.  On one occasion she exclaimed to a friend, “See!  Look at my Phillis!  Does she not seem as though she would speak to me?” Getting no better, she sent a loving request to Phillis to come to her at as early a moment as possible.  With a deep sense of gratitude to Mrs. Wheatley for countless blessings bestowed upon her, Phillis hastened to return to Boston.  She found her friend and benefactor just living, and shortly had the mournful satisfaction of closing her sightless eyes.  The husband and daughter followed the wife and mother quickly to the grave.  Young Mr. Wheatley married, and settled in England.  Phillis was alone in the world.

“She soon after received an offer of marriage from a respectable colored man, of Boston.  The name of this individual was John Peters.[349] He kept a grocery in Court Street, and was a man of handsome person.  He wore a wig, carried a cane, and quite acted out ‘the gentleman.’  In an evil hour, he was accepted; and, though he was a man of talents and information,—­writing with fluency and propriety, and, at one period, reading law,—­he proved utterly unworthy of the distinguished woman who honored him by her alliance.”

Her married life was brief.  She was the mother of one child, that died early.  Ignorant of the duties of domestic life, courted and flattered by the cultivated, Peters’s jealousy was at length turned into harsh treatment.  Tenderly raised, and of a delicate constitution, Phillis soon went into decline, and died Dec. 5, 1784, in the thirty-first[350] year of her life, greatly beloved and sincerely mourned by all whose good fortune it had been to know of her high mental endowments and blameless Christian life.

Her influence upon the rapidly growing anti-slavery sentiment of Massachusetts was considerable.  The friends of humanity took pleasure in pointing to her marvellous achievements, as an evidence of what the Negro could do under favorable circumstances.  From a state of nudity in a slave-market, a stranger to the English language, this young African girl had won her way over the rough path of learning; had conquered the spirit of caste in the best society of conservative old Boston; had brought two continents to her feet in admiration and amazement at the rare poetical accomplishments of a child of Africa![351]

She addressed a poem to Gen. Washington that pleased the old warrior very much.  We have never seen it, though we have searched diligently.  Mr. Sparks says of it,—­