y 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,--