Missed Prayers this morning and was at breakfast about the usual time. I employed my Morning in reading Ossian principally and writing an answer to my Mother’s letter.1 I was more pleased with this author than usual this morning because I read more attentively. The figures are remarkably beautiful although they are very much like each other. There is hardly variety enough in them. I used to like detached pieces of it and it was always associated in my mind with the highest flights of poetry—but I never could read it. By this, I find one important thing, that my poetical taste has developed very much latterly. My letter home was a singular one, it had not much of anything. It was a remarkable collection of dangerous expressions and foolish sentences. Some opinions hazarded which would do me no good, if they were known. I then attended Chapel and laboured through a long sermon from the President which was sufficient to disturb a saint. I could not delight in it.

My Bible somehow or other manages to get behind hand every little while although it appears to me, that nothing can be more constant than my attention. I found myself five chapters behind what I ought to be and I can recollect no evening when I missed. I made them up today. I have given no opinion of the Bible, not so much because I have made none, as that I could not do it. I have perhaps also singular ideas upon the subject. I cannot reconcile to myself much of this book with our present code of morals and I am inclined to think that this part of the bible will merely be used as a sort of reading book without any uncommon respect. I may say more when I am nearer to it’s close. In the afternoon Dr. Ware gave us a character of Moses which might have improved my Bible history knowledge doubtless had I attended to it but unfortunately I was asleep.

I read my Paley lesson over for tomorrow and one or two more articles in the Edinburgh Review which is highly critical this time. It had rained and looked so threatening that I did not take any thing like my usual walk tonight but sat in Otis’s part of the evening and 280part in Sheafe’s, doing nothing, but talking most foolishly about nothing at all. I have been so out of the habit of doing any thing in the Evening that it is impossible to read. At nine o’clock I came down, read my Bible, looked over my lesson which reminds me of the unsuccessful week and went to bed. X.