Were I not going now a most uninteresting journey, I would do this for myself. This tour hangs on my mind; nothing would suit my feelings so well as to stay here in my present melancholy gloom, reading divinity, and endeavouring so steadily to fix my mind on eternity and the hope of joining my dear child, as to work a change in my habits, my life, my conversation, and pursuits; and to do all that human frailty will permit to reconcile myself to the Almighty. These thoughts, however, I shall try to preserve in spite of a journey. I will take the New Testament and Wilberforce with me, and read a portion every day, and spend the Sundays in a manner I have never done yet in travelling. _August 7._—To Ely. Called for a moment on Carter, who thinks so highly of Bishop Newton that he intends to buy his works. At Ely quite alone, and no resource but in my own melancholy ideas. My first thought was to send to a Mr. Hall, who has hired Tattersall’s farm, or Mr. Metcalfe, a minor canon, who has written in the ‘Annals of Agriculture’—but I rejected the scheme and kept to solitude. As soon as I finished dinner I began Mr. Wilberforce for the fourth time, reading with renewed attention. I hear many objections to him, of his being a Presbyterian engrafted on a Methodist, but it is arrant nonsense. My mind goes with him in every word. View the Minster and Trinity chapel, and venerate the piety of former ages that raised such noble edifices in honour of God the Almighty giver and governor of all things. I once thought such buildings the efforts of superstition, perhaps folly! How different are my present sentiments! for what can be more rational than to raise temples of a character that shall impress some idea, however weak, of the sublimity of that infinite Being who made and pervades all that exists, except His own great creative self! _8th._—Rise at five, write to my friends Dr. Valpy and C. Cole. To Peterborough. Much time for reflection, and it is singular that even while I am depressed with deep melancholy at the loss I have sustained, yet unholy ideas and imaginations will intrude. Is this the devil and his powers of darkness which buffet and beset us? Is not depravity and sin so inherent in our natures that we are ever liable to these wanderings which so disgrace our nature at better moments? But the conclusion, whatever it be owing to, is clear, that the government of the thoughts is an essential part of our duty, as Johnson has well explained in an admirable ‘Rambler.’ Such thoughts, unresisted, seize and take possession of the mind, and they cannot do that without leading to action and all the guilt that may follow. Repel the first germinating principle of the idea, and the difficulty is not great; but indulge the pleasing dream and the heart is vitiated, for the imagination is impure. [_The remainder of the diary, in the same strain, is much too long for insertion. Here are a few closing sentences._]