ved never again to think of a voluntary withdrawal
from the cares and sorrows of her earthly lot, but with unwavering
fortitude to surrender herself to those influences over which she
could no longer exert any control. This brief conflict ended, she
resumed her wonted composure and cheerfulness.

Tacitus was now her favorite author. Hours and days she passed in
studying his glowing descriptions of heroic character and deeds.
Heroism became her religion; magnanimity and fortitude the idols of
her soul. With a glistening eye and a bosom throbbing with lofty
emotion, she meditated upon his graphic paintings of the martyrdom of
patriots and philosophers, where the soul, by its inherent energies,
triumphed over obloquy, and pain, and death. Anticipating that each
day might conduct her to the scaffold, she led her spirit through all
the possible particulars of the tragic drama, that she might become
familiar with terror, and look upon the block and the ax with an
undaunted eye.

Many hours of every day she beguiled in writing the memoirs of her own
life. It was an eloquent and a touching narrative, written with the
expectation that each sentence might be interrupted by the entrance of
the executioners to conduct her to trial and to the guillotine. In
this unveiling of the heart to the world, one sees a noble nature,
generous and strong, animated to benevolence by native generosity, and
nerved to resignation by fatalism. The consciousness of spiritual
elevation constituted her only religion and her only solace. The
anticipation of a lofty reputation after death was her only heaven.
The Christian must pity while he must admire. No one can read the
thoughts she penned but with the deepest emotion.

Now her mind wanders to the hours of her precocious and dreamy
childhood, and lingers in her little chamber, gazing upon the golden
sunset, and her eye is bathed in tears as she reflects upon her early
home, desolated by death, and still more desolated by that unhonored
union which the infidelity of the times tolerated, when one took the
position of the wife unblessed by the sanction of Heaven. Again her
spirit wings its flight through the gloomy bars of the prison to the
beautiful rural home to which her bridal introduced her, where she
spent her happiest years, and she forgets the iron, and the stone, and
the dungeon-glooms which surround her, as in imagination she walks
again among her flowers and through the green fields, and,