BOSTON, Jan. 7, 1839.—­I came here on the last day of the last year, and have since then been very much occupied in different ways.  Yesterday, I heard President Hopkins all day, and in the evening, a lecture from Dr. Follen on Pantheism.  The most abstract of all pantheistic systems he described to be that of the Brahmans, as taught in the Vedas and Vedashta, and also at first by Schelling, viz., that the absolute is the first principle of all things; and this absolute is not to be conceived of as possessing any attribute at all—­not even that of existence.  A system a little less abstract is that of the Eleatics, who believed in the absolute as existing.  Then that of Giordano Bruno, who made soul and matter the formative principle and the principal recipient of forces—­to be the ground of the universe.  Then Spinoza, who postulated thought as the representative of the spiritual, and extension as that of the material principle; and these together are his originaux.  From thence sprang the spiritual pantheists—­such as Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel—­and the material pantheists.

Wednesday, April 10th.—­To-morrow I go to Andover.  Have been indescribably hurried of late.  Have finished Claudius—­am reading Prometheus and Kant’s Critique. April 19th.—­Am reading Seneca’s Medea and Southey’s Life of Cowper.

ANDOVER, May 13th.—­Dr. Woods was remarking to-day at dinner on the influence of hope in sustaining under the severest sufferings.  It recalled a thought which occurred to me the other day in reading Prometheus; that, regarded as an example of unyielding determination and unconquerable fortitude he is not equal to Milton’s Satan.  For he has before him not only the hope, but the certainty of ultimate deliverance, whereas Satan bears himself up, by the mere force of his will, unsustained by hope, “which comes to all,” but not to him. 15th.—­It has just occurred to me that the doctrine of the soul’s mortality seems to have no point of contact with humanity.  It surely can not have been entertained as being agreeable to man’s wishes.  And what is there in the system of things, or in the nature of the mind, to suggest it?  On the contrary, everything looks in an opposite direction.  How is it possible to help seeing that the soul is not here in its proper element, in its native air?  How is it possible to escape the conviction that all its unsatisfied yearnings, its baffled aims, its restless, agonizing aspirings after a something, clearly perceived to exist, but to be here unattainable—­that all these things point to another life, the only true life of the soul?  There is such a manifest disproportion between all objects of earthly attainment and the capacities of the spirit, that, unless man is immortal, he is vastly more to be pitied than the meanest reptile that crawls upon the earth.  So I thought as I was walking this morning and saw a frog swimming in a puddle of water.  I could hardly help envying him when I considered that his condition was suited to his nature, and that he has no wants which are not supplied.