Such has been the feeling with which we have read and re-read the volume before us.  We knew but slightly her who is the subject of it, and are indebted to the memoir for any thing like a conception of the character; consequently we can better judge of its probable effect upon other minds.  We pronounce it a portrait successfully taken—­a piece of uncommonly skillful biography.  There is no gaudy exaggeration in it,—­no stiffness, no incompleteness.  We see the individual character we are invited to see, and in contemplating it, we have all along a feeling of personal acquisition.  We have found rare treasure; a true woman to be admired, a daughter whose worth surpasses estimation, a friend to be clasped with fervor to the heart, a lovely young Christian to be admired and rejoiced over, and a self-sacrificing missionary to be held in reverential remembrance.  Unlike most that is written to commemorate the dead, or that unvails the recesses of the human heart, this is a cheerful book.  It breathes throughout the air of a spring morning.  As we read it we inhale something as pure and fragrant as the wafted odor of

  “——­old cherry-trees,
  Scented with blossoms.”

We stand beneath a serene unclouded sky, and all around us is floating music as enlivening as the song of birds, yet solemn as the strains of the sanctuary.  It is that of a life in unison from its childhood to its close; rising indeed like “an unbroken hymn of praise to God.”  There is no austerity in its piety, no levity in its gladness.  It shows that “virtue in herself is lovely,” but if “goodness” is ever “awful,” it is not here in the company of this young happy Christian heart.

We have heard, sometimes, that a strictly religious education has a tendency to restrict the intellectual growth of the young, and to mar its grace and freedom.  We have been told that it was not well that our sons and daughters should commit to memory texts and catechisms, lest the free play of the fancy should be checked and they be rendered mechanical and constrained in their demeanor, and dwarfish in their intellectual stature.  We see nothing of this exemplified in this memoir.  One may look long to find an instance of more lady-like and graceful accomplishments, of more true refinement, of more liberal and varied cultivation, of more thorough mental discipline, of more pliable and available information, of a more winning and wise adaptation to persons and times and places, than the one presented in these pages.  And yet this fair flower grew in a cleft of rugged Calvinism; the gales which fanned it were of that “wind of doctrine” called rigid orthodoxy.  We know the soil in which it had its root.  We know the spirit of the teachings which distilled upon it like the dew.  The tones of that pulpit still linger in our ears, familiar as those of “that good old bell,” and we are sure that there is no pulpit in all New England more uncompromising in its demands, more strictly and severely searching in its doctrines.