When I ceased to be persecuted with examinations, and had no longer
anything to fill up my time, I felt bitterly the increasing weight
of solitude. I had permission to retain a bible, and my Dante; the
governor also placed his library at my disposal, consisting of some
romances of Scuderi, Piazzi, and worse books still; but my mind was
too deeply agitated to apply to any kind of reading whatever. Every
day, indeed, I committed a canto of Dante to memory, an exercise so
merely mechanical, that I thought more of my own affairs than the
lines during their acquisition. The same sort of abstraction
attended my perusal of other things, except, occasionally, a few
passages of scripture. I had always felt attached to this divine
production, even when I had not believed myself one of its avowed
followers. I now studied it with far greater respect than before;
yet my mind was often almost involuntarily bent upon other matters;
and I knew not what I read. By degrees I surmounted this
difficulty, and was able to reflect upon its great truths with
higher relish than I had ever before done. This, in me, did not
give rise to the least tendency to moroseness or superstition,
nothing being more apt than misdirected devotion to weaken and
distort the mind. With the love of God and mankind, it inspired me
also with a veneration for justice, and an abhorrence of wickedness,
along with a desire of pardoning the wicked. Christianity, instead
of militating against anything good, which I had derived from
Philosophy, strengthened it by the aid of logical deductions, at
once more powerful and profound.

Reading one day that it was necessary to pray without ceasing, and
that prayer did not consist in many words uttered after the manner