‘I daresay you will think this letter rather strange, but it cannot do me any good to bottle everything up; besides, I think there is no pleasure in letters which do nothing but detail matters of fact. I should have liked much better to have seen you; but as I suppose there is no chance of that for some time, I must make the best of it. When I said that I had taken to liking good books, I did not mean that I had read many. I have read over and over again Bishop Taylor’s _Holy Living and Dying_, but till I came here I had not gone farther; since, I have read five sermons of Bishop Wilson, one on the History of Christianity, and the others on Profiting by Sermons; also most of Law’s _Serious Call_, about which I remember what you said to me three years ago.’[51] To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Nov. 5, 1826. ‘It may seem an odd sort of thing to say, but I got from your letter something more like happiness than I have known since my mother died. Since that time it seems as if I had been ἄθεος ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ; but I hope I may yet get right at last. It is a great comfort to find so many expressions in the Psalms like “O tarry thou the Lord’s leisure,” as they serve to keep up the hope that, weary and unsatisfactory as are my attempts to be religious, they may in time “comfort my heart.” And now I can talk to you about myself, I feel a sort of security against bewildering my mind with vague thoughts, which I did not know where to check, because I could not get anyone to sympathise with them at all. ‘I have borrowed Mr. Bonnell’s _Life_,[52] and have got about two-thirds through it. I did not at first like the plan you recommended to me about reveries, as I had been directing all my actions with a view to fitting myself for realising my reveries. But it is a wretched unsatisfactory pursuit, for besides that it does not seem to have any real religion in it, I have often felt as if I had lost myself, and that I was acting blindly, without a drift. It is much better to give up all notion of guiding myself, and “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added.” I beg your pardon for putting before you the roundabout fantastic methods to which I have been resorting to arrive at a plain simple truth that ought to have come at once; but perhaps they may serve to show the state of my mind better than any direct description I could give. It is very frightful to see people like Mr. Bonnell so alarmed about themselves, and expressing so strongly the wretchedness of their moral condition. It seems as if, to a fellow like me, it must always be presumptuous not to despair. The evening before last I was much struck with a thought in the beginning of Hooker’s Preface to the _Ecclesiastical Polity_, about not permitting thoughts to pass away as in a dream. It seems as if people might make so much more out of their lives by keeping records of them….