Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/69

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and its Green Border-Land
.55

just at the entrance of the town on the south-west. The coincidences of the locality are felicitous and striking. Freedom, Peace, Temperance, Charity, and Godliness were the five ways of his good and beautiful life; and it was truly a happy accident to place his monument at such a point. Then the statue itself shows a happy inspiration in the sculptor. Standing among the emblems of his love and good works, the serene and benevolent face seems to beam with the living smile of a beating heart, and the half-extended arm and the open palm to be warm with the pulse of their old sweet life, as if still inviting the African slave-child or the homeless orphan to climb up against his bosom.

The Rev. John Angell James was a contemporary and co-resident with Joseph Sturge, and no town in England or in any other country ever had two more impressive lives than theirs breathing, walking, and working in its midst at the same time. I think it can be truly said, that for the last century, the English Independents have had no minister who has made a deeper or better mark upon the public mind than John Angell James. In every faculty of influence his was eminently fitted to produce this impression. He was not a profound scholar; he pretended to no classical culture. On his way from the humble walks and avocations of common life to the pulpit, he passed