“To-morrow I commence to work,” he writes on the evening of his return.  “My interior state is quiet and peaceful.  I have not met any one yet.  My dear mother understands me better than any one else.  How far business will interfere with my inner life remains to be seen.  O Lord! help me to keep my resolution, which is not to let the world enter my heart, but to keep it looking toward Thee!  My heart has been in a constant prayerful state since I have been at home.  It is busy in its own sanctuary, its own temple, God.  O Lord! preserve it.”

One of the first noteworthy things revealed by the diary—­which from this time on was kept with less regularity than before—­is that Isaac not only maintained his abstemious habits after his return, but increased their rigor.  For a robust man, working hard for many hours out of every twenty-four, and deprived of all the pleasant relaxations, literary, conversational and musical, to which he had been accustoming himself for many months, the choice of such a diet as is described in the following sentences was certainly extraordinary: 

“August 30.—­If the past nine months or more are any evidence, I find that I can live on very simple diet—­grains, fruit, and nuts.  I have just commenced to eat the latter; I drink pure water.  So far I have had wheat ground and made into unleavened bread, but as soon as we get in a new lot, I shall try it in the grain.”

He had evidently at this time a practical conviction of the truth of a principle which, in after years, he repeated to the present writer in the form of a maxim of the transcendentalists:  “A gross feeder will never be a central thinker.”  It is a truth of the spiritual no less than of the intellectual order.  A little later we come upon the following profession of a vegetarian faith, which will be apt to amuse as well as to edify the reader: 

“Reasons for not eating animal food.

“It does not feed the spirit.

“It stimulates the propensities.

“It is taking animal life when the other kingdoms offer sufficient and better increment.

“Slaughter strengthens the lower instincts.

“It is the chief cause of the slavery of the kitchen.

“It generates in the body the diseases animals are subject to, and encourages in man their bestiality.

“Its odor is offensive and its appearance unaesthetic.”

The apprehension under which he had labored, that city life would present many temptations which he would find it difficult to withstand, appears to have been unfounded.  Some few social relaxations he now and then permitted himself, but they were mostly very sober-toned.  “Last evening I attended a Methodist love-feast,” is his record of one of these.  “In returning I stopped at the ward political meeting.”  Then he notes that although the business he follows is especially full of temptations—­as no doubt it was to a man keeping so tight a rein over his most natural and legitimate appetites—­he feels deeply grateful that, so far, he has had no need to fear his being led away.  “What yet remains?” he adds.  “My diet is all purchased and all produced by hired labor.  I suppose that slave labor produces almost all my dress.  And I cannot say that I am rightly conditioned until all I eat, drink, and wear is produced by love.”