rcised memory and attention she took comparatively but
languid interest. Instruction, to bring her its full profit, must be
conveyed through the medium of moral emotion, but the mysterious power
of feeling to stimulate intellect was with her immense. She turned now
to the poets--Shakespeare, Byron, Dante, Milton, Virgil, Pope. A poet
herself, she discovered that these had more power than controversialists
to strengthen her religious convictions, as well as to enlarge her mind.
Above all, the writings of the poet-moralist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
helped her towards resolving the question that occupied her, of her true
vocation in life, now that her determination to take the veil was not a
little shaken.

The midnight student was by turns Amazon and sick-nurse as well. From
the fatigue of long watches over her books or by the invalid's bedside,
she found a better and more invigorating refreshment than sleep in
solitary morning rides across country. Her fearlessness on horseback was
madness in the eyes of the neighbors. Riding, then and there, was almost
unheard of for ladies, a girl in a riding-habit regarded as simply a
Cossack in petticoats, and Mademoiselle Dupin's delight in
horse-exercise sufficed to stamp her as eccentric and strong-minded in
the opinion of the country gentry and the towns-folk of La Chatre. They
had heard of her studies, too, and disapproved of them as unlady-like in
character. Philosophy was bad enough, but anatomy, which she had been
encouraged to take up by Deschartres, himself a proficient in medical
science, was worse--sacrilegious, for a person understood to be
professedly of a devotional turn of mind. She went game-shooting with
the old tutor; he had a mania for the sport, which she humored though
she did not share. But when quails were the object, she owns to have
enjoyed her part in the chase, which was to crouch in the furrows among
the green corn, imitating the cry of the birds to entice them within
gunshot of the sportsman. Lastly, finding in the feminine
costume-fashions of that period a dire impediment to out-door enterprise
of the sort, in a region of no roads, or bad roads, of rivers
perpetually in flood, turning the lanes into water-courses for
three-fourths of the year, of miry fields and marshy heaths, she
procured for herself a suit of boy's clothes, donning blouse and gaiters
now and then without compunction for these rough country walks and
rambles.

Here, indeed, was more th