Just a month after this letter to his friend, the same year which had first brought Huxley public recognition outside his special sphere brought him also the greatest sorrow perhaps of his whole life. I have already spoken of the sudden death of the little son in whom so much of his own and his wife's happiness was centred. The suddenness of the blow made it all the more crushing, and the mental strain, intensified by the sight of his wife's inconsolable grief, brought him perilously near a complete breakdown. But the birth of another son, on December 11, gave the mother some comfort; and as the result of a friendly conspiracy between her and Dr. Tyndall, Huxley himself was carried off for a week's climbing in Wales between Christmas and the New Year. His reply to a long letter of sympathy in which Charles Kingsley set forth the grounds of his own philosophy as to the ends of life and the hope of immortality, affords insight into the very depths of his nature. It is a rare outburst at a moment of intense feeling, in which, more completely than in almost any other writing of his, intellectual clearness and moral fire are to be seen uniting in a veritable passion for truth:--] 14, Waverley Place, September 23, 1860. My dear Kingsley, I cannot sufficiently thank you, both on my wife's account and my own, for your long and frank letter, and for all the hearty sympathy which it exhibits--and Mrs. Kingsley will, I hope, believe that we are no less sensible of her kind thought of us. To myself your letter was especially valuable, as it touched upon what I thought even more than upon what I said in my letter to you. My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them--and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is--Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie. And now I feel that it is due to you to speak as frankly as you have done to me. An old and worthy friend of mine tried some three or four years ago to bring us together--because, as he said, you were the only man who would do me any good. Your letter leads me to think he was right, though not perhaps in the sense he attached to his own words. To begin with the great doctrine you discuss. I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.