of mind in which the current of desire is flowing towards one high end. This does not presuppose knowledge, but it very soon attains it."[40] This was a profound conviction of her own, often expressed, as we shall hear, in her Addresses and Letters of Exhortation in later years. What she set herself to study at the Trinità de' Monti was the secret of _devotion_. She made notes of the Lady Superior's exhortations; of the spiritual exercises which were enjoined upon novices; of the forms and discipline of self-examination. She sought to extract the secret, and to apply it to the inculcation of the highest kind of service to man as the service of God. For many years the thought in her mind was to be the foundation of some distinctive order or sisterhood; and though in the end she came to be glad that she had not done this, she never abandoned the high ideal which was behind her thought. Nor, though in some ways and in some cases she came to be disillusioned about nursing sisterhoods, did she ever cease to speak with admiration of what she had seen and learnt in some of them. She thought more often, and with more affectionate remembrance, about the spirit of the best Catholic sisterhoods than of Kaiserswerth, or indeed of anything else in her professional experience. [39] The Convent was giving hospitality at this time to the Abbess of Minsk (in Lithuania), whose persecution by the Russian Government formed the subject of much debate. Miss Nightingale wrote a long account of the extraordinary adventures which the Abbess related to her. She was advised in 1853 to print this, but I cannot find that she did so. [40] Letter from R. Angus Smith, July 7, 1859. In such studies upon the Trinità de' Monti in the winter of 1847-48, she was taken, as she said in a note of self-examination, out of all interests that fostered her "vanity"; it was her "happiest New Year." "The most entire and unbroken freedom from dreaming I ever had," she wrote at a later time. "Oh, how happy I was!" And so again, looking back after twenty years, she wrote: "I never enjoyed any time in my life so much as my time at Rome."[41] [41] Letter to M. Mohl, Nov. 21, 1869. IV