One cannot help regretting that while so many contemporary chroniclers have left detailed and varied accounts of St. Francis, they only casually allude to St. Clare, calling her "a sweet spring blossom," or "the chief rival of the Blessed Francis in the observance of Gospel perfection," but leaving later writers to form their own pictures of the saint. And the picture they give is always of a silent and prayerful nun, beautiful of feature, sweet and gentle of disposition, coming ever to the help of those who needed it, and acting the part of a guardian angel to the Assisans. Her horizon was bounded by the mountains of the Spoletan valley; and from the outside world, on which her influence worked so surely during her life and for long centuries after her death, only faint echoes reached her when a pope or a cardinal came to see her, or a princess wrote her a letter from some distant country. Among the many royal and noble people who had entered a Poor Clare sisterhood, or like St. Elizabeth of Hungary had joined the Third Order, was the Blessed Agnes, daughter of the King of Bohemia, who, kindled with a desire for a religious life upon hearing the story of St. Clare, refused the hand of Frederick II, and passed her life in a convent. Often she wrote to the Assisan abbess getting in reply most charming letters, beginning "To her who is dearer to me than any other mortal," or "To the daughter of the King of Kings, to the Queen of Virgins, to the worthy spouse of Jesus Christ; the unworthy servant of the poor nuns of San Damiano sends greetings and rejoicings in the good fortune of living always in the extremest poverty." These two never met, but their friendship was a close one, and their correspondence, of which many letters are preserved, ceased only with their death.