The life and letters of Raja Rammohun Roy - WordPress.com

1 86 RAMMOHUN ROYRammohun cotinued to the last in close communicationor personal fellowship with the chief Unitarian families of thetime, the Estlins, the Carpenters, the Foxes, and the like.We have a letter of his to Rev. VV. J. Fox,* dated May 31,1831, acknowledging with truly Oriental courtesy certainbooks which the author had sent him, and hoping for aninterchange of visits "as soon as I am fully recovered" ;andon June loth, a note assuring Mr. Fox " it will give me morereal gratification to visit you in your cottage, as you call it,than to visit a palace. But as 1happen to be engaged fordinner every daytill the iQth, I would prefer seeing you atbreakfast. . ." This shows us something of the throng ofhonourto have entrusted to my care a resolution, the object of which isto welcome our illustrious oriental friend, and to communicate all wefeel and hope towards him. I ought not to .say all we feel and hope,for I am sure that it isimpossible to give expression to those sentimentsof interest and anticipation with which his advent here is associatedin all our minds.I recollect some writers have indulged themselves withinquiring what they should feel if any of (those time-honoured men whosenames have lived through the vicissitudes of ages, should appear amongthem.They have endeavoured to imagine what would be their sensationif a Plato or a Socrates, a Milton or a Newton were unexpectedly tohonour them with their presence.I recollect that a poet, who has wellbeen called divine, has drawn a beautiful picture of the feelings of thosewho first visited the southern hemisphere, and there saw, for the firsttime, that beautiful constelltation, the Golden Cross. It was with feelingssuch as they underwent, that I was overwhelmed when 1 stretched outin your name the hand of welcome to the Rajah Rammohun Roy. Inmy mind the effect of distance is very like the effect of time ;and he whocomes among us from a country thousands of miles off, must be lookedupon with the same interest as the illustrious men who lived thousandsof years ago. But in the case of our friend, his coming may be deemed* Editor of the Monthly Repository^ friend and patron of RobertBrowning, whose youthful Muse he was at this very time sedulously encouraging; he might almost be called the first man of any literary standingwho discovered the poet.