Dear B.B.,—­You must excuse my not writing before, when I tell you we are on a visit at Enfield, where I do not feel it natural to sit down to a letter.  It is at all times an exertion.  I had rather talk with you and Anne Knight quietly at Colebrooke Lodge over the matter of your last.  You mistake me when you express misgivings about my relishing a series of Scriptural poems.  I wrote confusedly; what I meant to say was, that one or two consolatory poems on deaths would have had a more condensed effect than many.  Scriptural, devotional topics, admit of infinite variety.  So far from poetry tiring me because religious, I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms in our Prayer-books for an hour or two together sometimes, without sense of weariness.

I did not express myself clearly about what I think a false topic, insisted on so frequently in consolatory addresses on the death of infants.  I know something like it is in Scripture, but I think humanly spoken.  It is a natural thought, a sweet fallacy, to the survivors, but still a fallacy.  If it stands on the doctrine of this being a probationary state, it is liable to this dilemma.  Omniscience, to whom possibility must be clear as act, must know of the child what it would hereafter turn out:  if good, then the topic is false to say it is secured from falling into future wilfulness, vice, etc.  If bad, I do not see how its exemption from certain future overt acts by being snatched away at all tells in its favor.  You stop the arm of a murderer, or arrest the finger of a pickpurse; but is not the guilt incurred as much by the intent as if never so much acted?  Why children are hurried off, and old reprobates of a hundred left, whose trial humanly we may think was complete at fifty, is among the obscurities of providence, The very notion of a state of probation has darkness in it.  The All-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing what we will do, when he knows before what we will do.  Methinks we might be condemned before commission.  In these things we grope and flounder; and if we can pick up a little human comfort that the child taken is snatched from vice (no great compliment to it, by the by), let us take it.  And as to where an untried child goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne the heat of the day,—­fire-purified martyrs and torment-sifted confessors,—­what know we?  We promise heaven, methinks, too cheaply, and assign large revenues to minors incompetent to manage them.  Epitaphs run upon this topic of consolation till the very frequency induces a cheapness.  Tickets for admission into paradise are sculptured out a penny a letter, twopence a syllable, etc.  It is all a mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning (having none that is clear), the more I flounder.  Finally, write what your own conscience, which to you is the unerring judge, deems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked