Evening.—­ ...  I have had such happy thoughts and prayers to-night!  You should certainly have knelt with me in my little room, where, for the first time a year ago this evening, I asked God to bless us; and you too, perhaps, then began first to pray for me.  Oh, what a wonderful time it was!...  I hope you have prayed for me to-day—­I don’t mean as you always do, but with new prayers wherewith to begin the new year.  God bless you and love you!

But this period was also one of large mental growth.  It was marked especially by two events that had a shaping influence upon both her intellectual and religious character.  One was the study of German.  She was acquainted already with French and Italian; she now devoted her leisure hours to the language and works of Schiller and Goethe.  These opened to her a new world of thought and beauty.  Her correspondence contains frequent allusions to the progress of her German reading.  Here is one in a letter to her cousin: 

I have read George Herbert a good deal this winter.  I have also read several of Schiller’s plays—­William Tell and Don Carlos among the rest—­and got a great deal more excited over them than I have over anything for a long while.  George has a large German library, but I don’t suppose I shall be much the wiser for it, unless I turn to studying theology.  Did you read in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the “Bekenntnisse einer schoenen Seele”?  I do think it did my soul good when I read it last July.  The account she gives of her religious history reminded me of mine in some points very strongly.

The other incident was her introduction to the writings of Fenelon—­an author whom, in later years, she came to regard as an oracle of spiritual wisdom.  In the letter just quoted, she writes:  “I am reading Fenelon’s ‘Maximes des Saints,’ and many of his ideas please me exceedingly.  Some of his ‘Lettres Spirituelles’ are delicious—­so heavenly, so child-like in their spirit.” [9]

[1] Jan, 1, 1845.—­I used never to confide my religious feelings to any one in the world.  I went on my toilsome, comfortless way quite by myself.  But when at the end of this long, gloomy way, I saw and knew and rejoiced in Christ, then I forgot myself and my pride and my reserve, and was glad if a little child would hear me say “I love Him!”—­glad if the most ignorant, the most hitherto despised, would speak of Him.

[2] Later she writes:  “I have had a long talk with sister to-day about Leighton.  She claims him, as all the Perfectionists do, as one of their number; though, by the way, in the common acceptation of the word, she is not a Perfectionist herself, but only on the boundary-line of the enchanted ground.  I am completely puzzled when I think on such subjects.  I doubt if sister is right, yet know not where she is wrong.  She does not obtrude her peculiar opinions on any one, and I began the conversation this afternoon myself.”