The Testament of Sir Humphry Davy
R.J. White introduces Humphry Davy: the inventor of the safety-lamp and one of Britain's greatest chemists was by temperament a romantic poet and philosopher.
Sir Humphry Davy left England for the last time in the spring of 1828. A sick man, at the age of fifty-one, he travelled by slow stages through the Tyrol and over the Alps to Rome. At Rome he rested, “wearing away the winter—a ruin among ruins,” writing and philosophizing in a little book which he intended to dedicate to his old friend, Tom Poole, of Nether Stowey. He thought much, in these last days, of Tom Poole, of Coleridge, of Old Beddoes and dear Maria Edgeworth, and all the happy hopeful company of his youth in the West Country.
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