pects
the most purely spiritual woman I have ever known, Christina differed
by this serenity, which in my mother was often disturbed by the doubts
that had their seeds in the old and superstitious Calvinism mingled
with the ground of her creed, and from which she never could liberate
herself.

Christina believed in God, in heaven, in the eternal life, with an
unfaltering constancy and fullness which left no questionings except,
it might be, concerning her fulfillment of her religious obligations.
And while I thought her belief in certain dogmas, such as
transubstantiation, and in the fasting and ritual of her High Church
observances, to be too trivial for such a really exalted intellect, so
near the perception of the essential truth, she held them with such a
childlike and tranquil faith that I would sooner have worshiped
with her than have disturbed her tranquillity in it. She gave me a
demonstration of doctrinal charity which was to me a novelty, and
showed me that tenets which are to me, and those trained like me, idle
formalities were in reality the steps of a ladder by which she must
climb to the realization of the abstract good. Dogmas and observances
apart, I felt that her religion was so much loftier than my own that,
though it would have been impossible for me to profess acceptance of
it, it was equally impossible to argue with her about it,--that it was
so woven into the fibre of her existence that to move it in the least
would be impossible, or, if possible, only at the cost of mental and
spiritual dislocation. But, with all this, there was not in her a
trace of the assumption of a religious superiority which I have so
often found in the driest non-conformist, or the putting me apart with
the creatures that perish and are doomed which I have oftener found in
Catholic friends, with whom I have felt that they regarded me with a
sort of pitiful friendship, as one certain to be damned, and so only
worth a limited regard, lest love should be wasted. In after years I
saw her not infrequently, and when illness and grief had touched her,
and I saw always the same serenity and the same wide personal charity.

Much of Christina's character one could see in her mother, a noble
and worshipful woman, in whom the domestic virtues mingled with the
spiritual in a way that set off the singleness of life of Christina
singularly, as if it were the same light in an earthen vessel. Mrs.
Rossetti was what one often hears spoken