hat lively colors
can express the soft emotions of a young heart endued with tenderness
and sensibility, greedy of happiness, beginning to be alive to the
beauties of nature, and perceiving the Deity alone? The first night I
spent in the convent was a night of agitation. I was no longer under
the paternal roof. I was at a distance from that kind mother, who was
doubtless thinking of me with affectionate emotion. A dim light
diffused itself through the room in which I had been put to bed with
four children of my own age. I stole softly from my couch, and drew
near the window, the light of the moon enabling me to distinguish the
garden, which it overlooked. The deepest silence prevailed around, and
I listened to it, if I may use the expression, with a sort of respect.
Lofty trees cast their gigantic shadows along the ground, and promised
a secure asylum to peaceful meditation. I lifted up my eyes to the
heavens; they were unclouded and serene. I imagined that I felt the
presence of the Deity smiling upon my sacrifice, and already offering
me a reward in the consolatory hope of a celestial abode. Tears of
delight flowed down my cheeks. I repeated my vows with holy ecstasy,
and went to bed again to taste the slumber of God's chosen children."

Her thirst for knowledge was insatiate, and with untiring assiduity
she pursued her studies. Every hour of the day had its appropriate
employment, and time flew upon its swiftest wings. Every book which
fell in her way she eagerly perused, and treasured its knowledge or
its literary beauties in her memory. Heraldry and books of romance,
lives of the saints and fairy legends, biography, travels, history,
political philosophy, poetry, and treatises upon morals, were all read
and meditated upon by this young child. She had no taste for any
childish amusements; and in the hours of recreation, when the mirthful
girls around her were forgetting study and care in those games
appropriate to their years, she would walk alone in the garden,
admiring the flowers, and gazing upon the fleecy clouds in the sky. In
all the beauties of nature her eye ever recognized the hand of God,
and she ever took pleasure in those sublime thoughts of infinity and
eternity which must engross every noble mind. Her teachers had but
little to do. Whatever study she engaged in was pursued with such
spontaneous zeal, that success had crowned her efforts before others
had hardly made a beginning.

In music and drawing