are mingled with yearnings for solitude.  “This book,” he writes on the last page of one of them, “has answered some little purpose; for when I wanted to speak to some one and yet was alone, it cost me no labor to scribble in it.  It would give me great pleasure if I had a friend who would exchange such thoughts with me.”  He was soon to enter into that spiritual heritage which among its other treasures bestows the beatitude of the sage, “Blessed is the man who hath found a true friend.”

Little by little a distinctly penitential mood came over him, and it occupies nearly the whole of the last volume of the diary with the most unreserved expressions of grief for sin, or, rather, for a state of sinfulness, since the specific mention of sins is nearly altogether wanting.  We meet with page after page of self-accusation in general terms:  “I am in want of greater love for those around me; I perform my spiritual duties too negligently; too little of my time is devoted to spiritual exercises.  I feel all over sick with sin!  Here is my difficulty, O Lord, and do Thou direct me:  I am always in doubt, when I do not think of Thee alone, that I am sinning and that my time is misspent.”

His protestations of sorrow are extremely fervent and very numerous; and as the Lent of 1845 approached he records his purpose of restricting himself to one meal a day.  As he never ate meat, nor any “product of animal life,” and drank only water, his “nuts, bread, and apples” once a day must have been his diet all through the penitential season.  The reader will remember ein herrliches Essen at Concord:  “bread, maple-sugar, and apples.”

In the middle of February he opened his mind more fully to Bishop McCloskey, whom he continually calls his spiritual director.  He had now to reveal the discoveries of holy penance, and to add to his other motives for leaving the world the dread of falling into mortal sin.  He had, he tells us, misgivings as to whether he was ambitious or not.  One of his spiritual states he thus alludes to: 

“I will ask my confessor how it is—­if it is so with others, that they feel no sense of things, no joy, no reality, no emotion, no impulse, nothing positive within or around,” but only the consciousness of the need of a terrible atonement.  This is accompanied by frantic prayers to God, invocations of the Blessed Virgin, St. Francis of Assisi and other saints.  And he says that he has been told that he is scrupulous, and complains that at confession he can only accuse himself in general terms.

Complete abandonment to the divine will seems to have been the outcome of a season of much distress of soul, and bodily mortification.  On April 2 he writes:  “The last time I saw my director he spoke to me concerning the sacred ministry, and this is a subject I feel an unspeakable difficulty about.  I told him that I desired to place myself wholly in his hands and should do whatever he directed.  I do not wish to be any more than nothing.  I give myself up.  So far the Lord seems to be with me, and I hope that He will not forsake me in the future.”