In the convent she had been familiarized with Romanism under its most attractive aspects. The moral refinement, the mystery, the seclusion, and picturesque beauties of that abode had a poetic charm that had carried her irresistibly away. But, confronted with the system in its practical working, she was staggered by many of its features. In the country churches around her she saw the peasantry encouraged in their grossest superstitions, and the ritual, carelessly hurried through, degenerate often into mere mockery. The practice of confession, moreover--her ultimate condemnation of which, as an institution whose results for good are scanty, its dangers excessive, will be endorsed by most persons in this country--and the Church's denial of the right of salvation to all outside its pale, revolted her; and she caught at the teaching of those who claimed liberty of conscience. "Reading Leibnitz," she observes, "I became a Protestant without knowing it." That purer and more liberal Christianity she dreamed of had, she discovered, been the ideal of many great men. The step brought her face to face with fresh and grave problems of which, she truly observes, the solutions were beyond her years, and beyond that era. There came to her rare moments of celestial calm and concord, but she owed them to other and indirect sources of inspiration. The study of philosophy, indeed, was not much more congenial to her at sixteen than arithmetic had been at six. In what merely exercised 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.