12, 1854.

I am just through with a summer, and a summer is to me always a trying ordeal.

I have determined not to spend so much time at the Atheneum another season, but to put some one in my place who shall see the strange faces and hear the strange talk.
"How much talk there is about religion! Giles [Footnote: Rev.Henry Giles.] I like the best, for he seems, like myself, to have no settled views, and to be religious only in feeling.

He says he has no piety, but a great sense of infinity.
"Yesterday I had a Shaker visitor, and to-day a Catholic; and the more I see and hear, the less do I care about church doctrines.

The Catholic, a priest, I have known as an Atheneum visitor for some time.