it. My dear brother, you will hear it with
a sad heart;--your nephew and mine, our only sister's
only child, has, in relation to religion at least, become
an absolute sceptic!

I well recollect the tenderness you felt for him, doubly endeared
by his own amiable dispositions and the remembrance of her whom
in so many points he resembled. What must be mine, who so long
stood to the orphan in the relations which his mother's love and
my own affection imposed upon me! It is hardly a figure to say I
felt for him as for a son. "Ah!" you will say as you glance at your
own children, "my bachelor brother cannot understand that even such
an affection is still a faint resemblance of parental love."

It may be so. I know that that love is sui generis; and as I have
often heard from those who are fathers, its depth and purity were
never realized till they became such. But neither, perhaps, can you
know how nearly such a love as I have felt for Harrington, committed
to me in death by one I loved so well,--beloved alike for her sake
and for his own,--the object of so much solicitude during his
childhood and youth,--I say you can hardly, perhaps, conceive how
near such an affection may approach that of a parent; how closely
such a graft upon a childless stock may resemble the incorporate
life of father and son.

You remember what hopes we both formed of his youth, from the
promise alike of his heart and of his intellect, How fondly we
predicted a career of future usefulness to others, and honor and
happiness to himself! You know how often I used to compare him,
for the silent ease with which he mastered difficult subjects,
and the versatility with which he turned his mind to the most
opposite pursuits, to the youthful Theaetetus, as described in
Plato's dialogue the movements of whose mind Theodorus compares
to the "noiseless flow of oil" from the flask.

He was just fourteen and a half when you left England; he is
now, therefore, nearly twenty-nine. He left me four years ago,
when he was just twenty-five,--about a year after the termination
of his college course, which you know was honorable to him, and
gratifying to me. He then went to spend a year, or a year and a
half, as he supposed, in Germany. His stay (he was not all the
time in Germany, however) was prolonged for more than three years.
In the letters which I received from him, and which gradually
became more rare and more brief, there was (without one symptom
of decay o