or ever revolving in a void; a burning
ardor, which, in the absence of sufficing affections below, turned
upward, and became a subtile mysticism. When practical duty,
friendship, literature, philosophy, and charitable deeds had failed
to absorb and satisfy her, plainly there was but one resource left,
religion. She entered on the path to God and his fellowship, the
sublime way of the life of perfection. She entered on it with an
extraordinary capacity for ascending through the various degrees of
perception, feeling, and transfusion; and, at the same time, with a
power of rational poise which kept her experience of piety from the
two extremes of mawkishness and delirium. Such balancing good sense
and sobriety, such freedom from every thing morbid, combined with so
much thoroughness of faith and so much fervor, we know not where else
to find. Some hearts open downward, and send their exciting drench
through the body; hers opened upward, and sent its pure vapor aloft
into the mind to wear celestial colors. Her head was a higher heart,
playing off intelligence and affection, transmuted into each other.

In the charming treatise on "Old Age," from the pen of Madame
Swetchine, a piece of serene poetry and impassioned wisdom, a critic
complains that she rather transfigures the subject than shows it.
But, however much she may have transfigured it in description, in
person and experience she has shown it in the most beautiful form of
truth of which it is susceptible. Year by year, to the very end, she
became ever wiser, calmer, more influential, more honored and
beloved, more saintly and content. Her religious abnegation grew
perfect; her peace deepened; her active benevolence broadened; her
spirit, always genially tolerant, acquired a mellower ripeness. In
relation to one of her acquaintances, she says, "The last time I saw
him, I was struck by a kind of rigidity, of bitterness, a want of
charity in his judgments which injured their justice; for the more I
see, the more I am convinced that we must love in order to know." The
detestable Rochefoucauld said, "Old age is the hell of women." For
Madame Swetchine it had much more of paradise, as the rich ardor and
impetuosity of her youth slowly moderated, and, by judicious
oversight, she trained her powers into harmony among themselves and
submission to God. Long before, she had said that the saddest of all
sights was that of an aged woman, deprived of the consideration and
respect