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].

My dear Mr. Boyd,—­I won’t ask you to forgive me for not writing before, because I know very well that you would rather have not heard from me immediately....  And so, you and Mrs. Mathew have been tearing to pieces—­to the very rags—­all my elaborate theology!  And when Mr. Young is ‘strong enough,’ he is to help you at your cruel work!  ’The points upon which you and I differed’ are so numerous, that if I really am wrong upon every one of them, Mrs. Mathew has indeed reason to ‘punish me with hard thoughts.’  Well, she can’t help my feeling for her much esteem, although I never saw her.  And if I were to see her, I would not argue with her; I would only ask her to let me love her.  I am weary of controversy in religion, and should be so were I stronger and more successful in it than I am or care to be.  The command is not ‘argue with one another,’ but ‘love one another.’  It is better to love than to convince.  They who lie on the bosom of Jesus must lie there together!