O sweet incendiary! shew here thy art Upon this carcass of a cold hard heart; Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light that play Among the leaves of thy large books of day, Combined against this breast at once break in And take away from me myself and sin; This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be, And thy best fortune such fair spoils of me. O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By all thy lives and deaths of love; By thy large draughts of intellectual day; And all thy thirsts of love more large than they; By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire; By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire; By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His; By all the Heavens thou hast in Him, (Fair sister of the Seraphim!); By all of Him we have in thee;-- Leave nothing of myself in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may die. SOME SELECTED PASSAGES * _The translations in the following pages are mainly those of Woodhead and Lewis_. TERESA ON HERSELF I had a father and a mother who both feared God. My father had his chief delight in the reading of good books, and he did his best to give his children the same happy taste. This also helped me much, that I never saw my father or my mother regard anything but goodness. Though possessing very great beauty in her youth, my mother was never known to set any store by it. Her apparel, even in her early married life, was that of a woman no longer young. Her life was a life of suffering, her death was most Christian. After my mother's removal, I began to think too much about my dress and my appearance, and I pursued many such like things that I was never properly warned against, full of mischief though they were both to myself and to others. I too early learned every evil from an immoral relative. I was very fond of this woman's company. I gossiped and talked with her continually. She assisted me to all the amusements I loved; and, what was worse, she found some very evil amusements for me, and in every way communicated to me her own vanities and mischiefs. I am amazed to think on the evil that one bad companion can do; nor could I have believed it, unless I had known it by experience. The company and the conversation of this one woman so changed me that scarcely any trace was left in me of my natural disposition to virtue. I became a perfect reflection of her and of another who was as bad as she was.