To Miss Grace Norton.

May 24, 1872.

It was only a short time after my last letter that my father met with the serious accident from a fall, which, on account of his greatly enfeebled health, soon ended fatally. On returning to Cambridge, I was informed of the sad loss which had befallen you all. The death of Mrs. Charles Eliot Norton in Europe, in February, 1872. ⁶⁷ . . . The impulse I felt to respond to the short note I received from Miss Jane seemed to me intrusive, rude, unfeeling. This instinct to regard language as a sort of lying device (dating back, perhaps, of its very invention— driving us back, as it were, to the dumb, inarticulate stage of our existence, when nothing but gestures and cries could utter our emotions) is, after all, a false instinct in a rational being, — to be yielded to only so long as it can master the more refined and genuine feelings which reflection

and speech really serve to express,—which they were not invented to conceal.

Much of the sting of mere animal and inarticulate grief is removed by the form the sorrow takes under the influence of reflection and the calmer, more cheerful emotions which grow up with it. Pure love and true respect, which make their objects as enduring and deathless as they themselves are, take much of the pain away from grief. Their objects are always invisible, whether in the living or the dead, and they suffer no shock except from deceit, or the discovered unreality of these objects, or from spiritual death. The painful shock which we must, nevertheless, feel when a dearly loved friend is cut off in the course of a useful, responsible, or honorable career,—which we do not experience when the work of a life is finished before the life itself ends, — this comes, I am convinced, from an association of the instinctive aversion we have for death, with the sympathies we feel for the purposes, the ambitions, the aspirations of a true and devoted life. It is difficult to imagine that such a breach in nature can be reconciled with faith in benevolent providence. We cannot, at such a time, believe that any thing can replace at all adequately the lost mother’s love and care. But time and reflection dissolve this false association; not by that animal oblivion which still fears and shrinks from death, but by the survival and immortality of the real objects of pure affection, — in their past influences, in their essential worth, and in a reverent memory.

I have been a long time detained in Cambridge, but propose to go to Northampton to-morrow for a short visit to my brother. I was quite absorbed a few weeks ago in writing a rejoinder, so to speak, to Mr. Mivart’s reply to my criticisms of his book. It is now m print, and will be published in the July number of the “North American Review.” Evolution by Natural Selection: Philosophical Discussions, p. 168. ⁶⁸ I have sent a proof of it to

Mr. Darwin. It is not properly a rejoinder, but a new article, repeating and expounding some of the points of my pamphlet, and answering some of Mr. Mivart’s replies incidentally. I made haste, after concluding to write the article, to finish it and get it off my hands, so that I might be unimpeded in my preparations for the trip to England, — which is now fixed for the 2d of July.