she made great proficiency. She was even more
fond of all that is beautiful and graceful in the accomplishments of a
highly-cultivated mind, than in those more solid studies which she
nevertheless pursued with so much energy and interest.

The scenes which she witnessed in the convent were peculiarly
calculated to produce an indelible impression upon a mind so
imaginative. The chapel for prayer, with its somber twilight and its
dimly-burning tapers; the dirges which the organ breathed upon the
trembling ear; the imposing pageant of prayer and praise, with the
blended costumes of monks and hooded nuns; the knell which tolled the
requiem of a departed sister, as, in the gloom of night and by the
light of torches, she was conveyed to her burial--all these
concomitants of that system of pageantry, arranged so skillfully to
impress the senses of the young and the imaginative, fanned to the
highest elevation the flames of that poetic temperament she so
eminently possessed.

God thus became in Jane's mind a vision of poetic beauty. Religion was
the inspiration of enthusiasm and of sentiment. The worship of the
Deity was blended with all that was ennobling and beautiful. Moved by
these glowing fancies, her susceptible spirit, in these tender years,
turned away from atheism, from infidelity, from irreligion, as from
that which was unrefined, revolting, vulgar. The consciousness of the
presence of God, the adoration of his being, became a passion of her
soul. This state of mind was poetry, not religion. It involved no
sense of the spirituality of the Divine Law, no consciousness of
unworthiness, no need of a Savior. It was an emotion sublime and
beautiful, yet merely such an emotion as any one of susceptible
temperament might feel when standing in the Vale of Chamouni at
midnight, or when listening to the crash of thunder as the tempest
wrecks the sky, or when one gazes entranced upon the fair face of
nature in a mild and lovely morning of June, when no cloud appears in
the blue canopy above us, and no breeze ruffles the leaves of the
grove or the glassy surface of the lake, and the songs of birds and
the perfume of flowers fill the air. Many mistake the highly poetic
enthusiasm which such scenes excite for the spirit of piety.

While Jane was an inmate of the convent, a very interesting young
lady, from some disappointment weary of the world, took the veil. When
one enters a convent with the intention of becoming a nun, she