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,