Madame Swetchine was endowed from birth with the material, the physiological conditions, for a great and original character, force competent to the finest and the grandest things, with an over-bias of that force to the brain. For long periods, she was compelled to walk in her chamber from seven to eight hours a day, to avoid intolerable nervous pressures and pains. At sixty-six, she wrote to one of her friends, "My interior life sterilizes itself by reason of superabundance; the too great fullness causes an incessant restlessness. I cannot give body to the multitude of confused ideas which crowd each other, interweave, and suffocate me for want of articulation." This profuse force, which continued throughout her life, enabled her to achieve an amount of work, and acquire a wealth of knowledge and wisdom, truly astonishing. Her youthful education, with the many difficult accomplishments she mastered, was the first resource for the occupation of her teeming energy. The second was the discharge of her domestic and public duties, with as much discretion and skill as if her sole ambition were to be a faultless housekeeper and member of the social order. The third was friendship, to whose genial duties of visiting and correspondence she devoted herself with a fullness and an ardor as passionate as they were genuine. And yet there remained a surplusage of unappropriated soul, whose vague and constant action distressed her. She entered on an extensive study of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy. Her biographer says, that scarcely an important work on these subjects appeared in Europe for fifty years with whose contents she did not familiarize herself, pen in hand. She interspersed these arduous labors by a systematic application to philanthropic works, personally visiting the sick and the poor, and ministering to their wants. And still her force was unexhausted she had more faculty and strength longing to be used, and disturbing her with mysterious solicitations; a solitary activity, without aliment; a wheel for ever revolving in a void; a burning ardor, which, in the absence of sufficing affections below, turned upward, and became a subtile mysticism. When practical duty, friendship, literature, philosophy, and charitable deeds had failed to absorb and satisfy her, plainly there was but one resource left, religion. She entered on the path to God and his fellowship, the sublime way of the life of perfection. She entered on it with an extraordinary capacity for ascending through the various degrees of perception, feeling, and transfusion; and, at the same time, with a power of rational poise which kept her experience of piety from the two extremes of mawkishness and delirium. Such balancing good sense and sobriety, such freedom from every thing morbid, combined with so much thoroughness of faith and so much fervor, we know not where else to find. Some hearts open downward, and send their exciting drench through the body; hers opened upward, and sent its pure vapor aloft into the mind to wear celestial colors. Her head was a higher heart, playing off intelligence and affection, transmuted into each other.