Teresa was greatly blessed in both her parents. 'It helped me much that I never saw my father or my mother respect anything in any one but goodness.' Her father was a great reader of the best books, and he took great pains that his children should form the same happy habit and should carefully cultivate the same excellent taste. Her mother, while a Christian gentlewoman of the first social standing, did not share her husband's love of serious literature. She passed far too much of her short lifetime among the romances of the day, till her daughter has to confess that she took no little harm from the books that did her mother no harm but pastime to read. As for other things, her father's house was a perfect model of the very best morals and the very best manners. Alonso de Cepeda was a well-born and a well-bred Spanish gentleman. He came of an ancient and an illustrious Castilian stock; and, though not a rich man, his household enjoyed all the nobility of breeding and all the culture of mind and all the refinement of taste for which Spain was so famous in that great age. All her days, and in all her ups and downs in life, we continually trace back to Teresa's noble birth and noble upbringing no little of her supreme stateliness of deportment and serenity of manner and chivalry of character. Teresa was a perfect Spanish lady, as well as a mother in Israel, and no one who ever conversed with her could for a moment fail to observe that the oldest and best blood of Spain mantled in her cheek and shone in her eye. A lion encompassed by crosses was one of the quarters of her father's coat of arms. And Teresa took that up and added out of it a new glory to all her father's hereditary honours. For his daughter was all her days a lioness palisaded round with crosses, till by means of them she was transformed into a lamb. But, all the time, the lioness was still lurking there. Teresa's was one of those sovereign souls that are born from time to time as if to show us what our race was created for at first, and for what it is still destined. She was a queen among women. She was in intellect the complete equal, and in still better things than intellect far the superior, of Isabella and Elizabeth themselves. As she says in an outspoken autobiographic passage, hers was one of those outstanding and towering souls on which a thousand eyes and tongues are continually set without any one understanding them or comprehending them. Her coming greatness of soul is foreseen by some of her biographers in the attempt which she made while yet a child to escape away into the country of the Moors in search of an early martyrdom, so that she might see her Saviour all the sooner, and stand in His presence all the purer. 'A woman,' says Crashaw, 'for angelical height of speculation: for masculine courage of performance, more than a woman; who, while yet a child, outran maturity, and durst plot a martyrdom.