ard with the greatest questions. [287] May it find its way
out to light! Thus far its light is, to my thinking, the profoundest
darkness. With our house's love to your house,

Yours ever,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Miss Catherine M. Sedgwick.

SHEFFIELD, March 28, 1866.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--To-day I am seventy-two years old. If I write to any
one to-day, it must be to some one whose friendship is nearly as old as
myself. Looking about me, I find no such one but you. Fifty years I have
known you. Fifty years ago, and more, I saw you in your father's house;
and charming as you were to my sight then, you have never--youth's
loveliness set at defiance--been less so since. Forty years I think I
have known you well. Thirty years we have been friends; and that word
needs no epithet nor superlative to make it precious. This morning I
called my wife to come and sit down by me, saying, "I will read you an
old man's Idyl." And I read that in the March number of the "Atlantic."
I believe Holmes wrote it; but whoever did, it is beautiful, and more
than that it was to us--for it was true.

The greatest disappointment that I meet in old age is that I am not so
good as I expected to be, nor so wise. I am ashamed to say that I was
never so dissatisfied with myself as I am now. It seems as if it could
not be a right state of things. My ideal of old age has been something
very different. And yet seventy years is still within the infancy of the
immortal life and progress. Why should it not say with the Apostle, "Not
as though [288] I had attained, neither were already perfect." I can say
with him, in some respects, "I have fought a good fight." I have fought
through early false impressions of religion. I have fought through many
life problems. I have fought, in these later years, through Mansel and
Herbert Spencer, as hard a battle as I have ever had. But I have come,
through all, to the most rooted conviction of the Infinite Rectitude
and Goodness. Nothing, I think, can ever shake me from this,-that all
is well, and shall be forever, whatever becomes of me. . . . Ever your
friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To Mrs. David Lane.

SHEFFIELD, July 9, 1866.

DEAR FRIEND,--I am etonne, as the French have it; at least Moliere and
Corneille--whom I have been reading by and large of late, having read
all the new things I could get hold of-are continually having
their personages etonned. Or, I feel like Dominie Sampson, and say,
"Pro-di-gi-ous!" Not as h