progress in the highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature;
a necessity equally from the ardor with which she sought it, and
from the spontaneous tendency of faculties which could not receive
an impression or an experience without making it the source or
occasion of an accession of wisdom.

* * * * *

In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition
(including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order
of Nature and the universe) and an earnest protest against many
things which are still part of the established constitution of
society, resulted not from the intellect, but from strength, a noble
and elevated feeling, and co-existent with a highly reverential
nature. In general spiritual characteristics, as well as in
temperament and organization, I have often compared her, as she was
at that time, to Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so
far as his powers were developed in his short life, was but a child
compared with what she ultimately became.

Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller
practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect
instrument, piercing to the heart and marrow of the matter, always
seizing the essential idea or principle.

The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did
her sensitive as well as her mental qualities, would, with her gifts
of feeling and imagination, have fitted her for a consummate
artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence
would certainly have made her a great orator. And her profound
knowledge of human nature, and discernment and sagacity in practical
life, would, in the times when such a career was open to women, have
made her eminent among the rulers of mankind.

Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once
the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in my
life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties,
but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings
of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them by
imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of her
own.

The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest
feeling, but for her boundless generosity, a