Thank you for John’s translation of the German song, the original of which I know and like very much.  The thoughts it suggested to you must constantly arise in all of us.  I believe that in these matters I feel all that you do, but not with the same intensity.  To adore is most natural to the mind contemplating beauty, might, and majesty beyond its own powers; to implore is most natural to the heart oppressed with suffering, or agitated with hopes that it cannot accomplish, or fears from which it cannot escape.  The difference between natural and revealed religion is that the one worships the loveliness and power it perceives, and the other the goodness, mercy, and truth in which it believes.  The one prays for exemption from pain and enjoyment of happiness for body and mind in this present existence; the other for deliverance from spiritual evils, or the possession of spiritual graces, by which the soul is fitted for that better life toward which it tends....

I do not think “Juliet” has written to you hitherto, and I am rather affronted at your calling me so.  I have little or no sympathy with, though much compassion for, that Veronese young person....  There is but one sentiment of hers that I can quote with entire self-application, and that is—­

“I have no joy of this contract to-night;
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden.”

In spite of which the foolish child immediately secures her lover’s word, appoints the time for meeting, and makes every arrangement for following up the declaration she thought too sudden by its as sudden execution.  Poor Juliet!  I am very sorry for her, but do not like to be called after her, and do not think I am like her.  I have been working very hard every day since you left Bristol (my belief is that Juliet was very idle).  I am sorry to say I find my playing very hard work; but easy work, if there is such a thing, would not be best for me just now.

Yours ever,
F. A. K.

Sunday, Exeter.—­To church with Dall and my father, a blessing that I can never enjoy in London, where he is all but stared out of countenance if he shows his countenance in a church, and it requires more devotion to the deed than I fear he possesses to encounter the annoyance attendant upon it.  We heard an excellent sermon, earnest, sober, simple, which I was especially grateful for on my father’s account.  Women don’t mind bad preaching; they have a general taste for sermons, and, like children with sweeties, will swallow bad ones if they cannot get good.  “We have a natural turn for religion,” as A.F. said of me; but men, I think, get a not unnatural turn against it when they hear it ill advocated....

The day has been lovely, and from my perch among the clouds here I am looking down upon a lovely view.  Following the irregular line of buildings of the street, the eye suddenly becomes embowered in a thick rich valley of foliage,