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literary course has been a happy one. It commenced in impulse, and was continued from habit. Two principles it has ever kept in view—not to interfere with the discharge of womanly duty, and to aim at being an instrument of good.

My journals, which I have already mentioned were begun at an early age, were usually made the repositories of my poems, in the order in which they were composed. Those systematic records became a sort of necessity of my existence. They seemed an adjunct in religious progress, and to justify the adjuration with which one of them is consecrated:

"Give me Thine aid calmly to look upon the changes that are appointed me, and to love the little streams fed hourly from the fountain of Divine Mercy; and to hope that, when I fade, as I soon shall, like the grass, I may be renewed in the image of a glorious immortality."