In this simple and natural way began Harriet’s distinctive religious experience. But we must not think of it as going on always like the flow of a calm river. There were many doubts and tremblings to be mastered, many puzzles to unravel as she went along, especially during the years from twelve to twenty. We may say, however, that the experience of happy trust in God became in the end so much the law of her life that it could never be torn away from her by any of the events of her mature days, whether of suffering or of prosperity. It seems the greatest pity that the earlier stages of her religious experience should not have gone on smoothly, as that of her wonderful mother had done. Perhaps, however, others with difficulties like hers may be glad to look over the record of her struggles and may take courage from her victories. We have seen in the last chapter that Harriet had not been many years at Hartford before a shadow seemed to be settling down upon her spirit. There were certainly good reasons for this. In the first place she was very much overworked as pupil and teacher in the Hartford Female Seminary. Translating Ovid into English verse at thirteen years of age, teaching Virgil and Rhetoric at fourteen, studying French and Italian and drawing and painting, taking a niggardly half hour for the mid-day dinner, and snatching a bit of supper as she could, doing her share and more to keep the domestic wheels of the large household at Hartford running smoothly, and living excitedly in the midst of this company of complex personalities, having no outdoors, no rest, no play--this way of life was enough to interfere with the physical well-being of any growing girl, even with that of a robust one fresh from the Litchfield mountains! Harriet’s father understood perfectly well the relation between our mental activity and our supply of physical energy. We know this because we so often found him relieving the overstrain by periods of devotion to the woodpile and the garden; and it is interesting to see how he accompanied a prescription for spiritual ills with one enjoining obedience to the laws of the body. None could have given better advice also than he did in regard to the steadying of religious emotionalism during revival among the students in Catherine’s school, to keep them from undue excitement and to make the revival season reasonable in its excitement and permanent in its effects. But it is one thing to advise and another to make people put the counsel into practice.