She alludes repeatedly in her correspondence to the delight which she found on the Sabbath in listening to that eminent preacher and divine, the Rev. Dr. Wm. S. Plumer, who was then settled in Richmond.  In a letter to her cousin she writes: 

I have become much attached to him; he seems more than half in heaven, and every word is full of solemnity and feeling, as if he had just held near intercourse with God.  I wish that you could have listened with me to his sermons to-day.  They have been, I think, blessed messages from God to my soul.

All her letters at this time glow with religious fervor.  “How wonderful is our divine Master!” she seemed to be always saying to herself.  “It has become so delightful to me to speak of His love, of His holiness, of His purity, that when I try to write to those who know Him not, I hardly know what is worthy of even a mention, if He is to be forgotten.”  And several years afterwards she refers to this period as a time when she “shrank from everything that in the slightest degree interrupted her consciousness of God.”

The following letter to a friend, whose name will often recur in these pages, well illustrates her state of mind during the entire winter.

To Miss Anna S. Prentiss.  Richmond, Feb 26, 1841.

Your very welcome letter, my dear Anna, arrived this afternoon, and, as my labors for the week are over, I am glad of a quiet hour in which to thank you for it.  I do not thank you simply because you have so soon answered my letter, but because you have told me what no one else could do so well about your own very dear self.  When I wrote you I doubted very much whether I might even allude to the subject of religion, although I wished to do so, since that almost exclusively has occupied my mind during the last year.  I saw you in the midst of temptations to which I have ever been a stranger, but which I conceived to be decidedly unfavorable to growth in any of the graces which make up Christian character.  It was not without hesitation that I ventured to yield to the promptings of my heart, and to refer to the only things which have at present much interest for it.  I can not tell you how I do rejoice that you have been led to come out thus upon the Lord’s side, and to consecrate yourself to His service.  My own views and feelings have within the last year undergone such an entire change, that I have wished I could take now some such stand in the presence of all who have known me in days past, as this which you have taken.  My first and only wish is henceforth to live but for Him, who has graciously drawn my wandering affections to Himself....  You speak of the faintness of your heart—­but “they who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,” and I do believe the truth of these precious words; not only because they are those of God, but also because my own experience adds happy witness to them.  I have lived many years with only just enough of hope to keep me from actual despair.