May God bless you, dear Mrs. Martin! Ever believe me, your affectionate E.B. BARRETT. _To H.S. Boyd_ Sidmouth: Friday [1834]. My dear Friend,--I don't know how I shall begin to persuade you not to be angry with me, but perhaps the best plan will be to confess as many sins as would cover this sheet of paper, and then to go on with my merits. Certainly I am altogether guiltless of your charge of not noticing your book's arrival because no Calvinism arrived with it. I told you the bare truth when I told you _why_ I did not write immediately. The passage relating to Calvinism I certainly read, and as certainly was sorry for; but as certainly as both those certainties, such reading and such regret had nothing whatever to do with the silence which made you so angry with me. The other particular thing of which I should have written is Mr. Parker and my letters. I am more and, more sorry that you should have sent them to him at all--not that their loss is any loss to anybody, but that I scarcely like the idea--indeed, I don't like it at all--of their remaining, worthless as they are, at Mr. P.'s mercy. As for my writing about them, I should not be able to make up my mind to do _that_. You know I had nothing to do with their being sent to Mr. Parker, and was indeed in complete ignorance of it. Besides, I should be half ashamed to write to him now on any subject. A very long interregnum took place in our correspondence, which was his own work; and when he wrote to me the summer before last, I delayed from week to week, and then from month to month, answering it. And now I feel ashamed to write at all. Perhaps you will wonder why I am not ashamed to write to _you_. Indeed I have meant to do it very, very often. Don't be severe upon me. I am always afraid of writing to you too often, and so the opposite fault is apt to be run into--of writing too seldom. IF THAT is a _fault_. You see my scepticism is becoming faster and faster developed. Let me hear from you soon, if you are not angry. I have been reading the Bridgewater treatise, and am now trying to understand Prout upon Chemistry. I shall be worth something at last, shall I not? Who knows but what I may die a glorious death under the _pons asinorum_ after all? Prout (if I succeed in understanding him) does not hold that matter is infinitely divisible; and so I suppose the seeds of matter--the ultimate molecules--are a kind of _tertium quid_ between matter and spirit. Certainly I can't believe that any kind of matter, primal or ultimate, can be _indivisible_, which it must according to his view. Chalmers's treatise is, as to eloquence, surpassingly beautiful; as to matter, I could not walk with him all the way, although I longed to do it, for he walked on flowers, and under shade--'no tree on which a fine bird did not sit.' ... Believe me, your affectionate friend, E.B.B. _To H.S. Boyd_ Sidmouth: September 14, [1834].