I have read this time the whole of the "Examiner," which I seldom do. It is all very good and satisfactory. Osgood's article on Robertson is excellent; it appreciates him and his time. One laments that his mind had so hard a lot; but every real man must, in one way or another, fight a great battle. . . . Especially I feel indebted to Abbot's article. Truly he 'says, that the great question of the coming days is,--theism, or atheism? Not whether Jesus is our Master, the chief among men, but whether the God in whom Jesus believed really exists; and, by consequence, whether the immortality which lay open to his vision is but a dream of weary and burdened humanity? Herbert Spencer believes in no such God and Father, and his religion, which he vaunts so much, is but a hard and cold abstraction. On other subjects he is a great writer; and in his volume of essays there is not one which is not marked with strong and original thought. It is a prodigious intellect, certainly, and struggling hard 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.