He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets.

She discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was St.Aubert's principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent means of happiness.

'A well-informed mind,' he would say, 'is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice.

The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness.

Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within.
Thought, and cultivation, are necessary equally to the happiness of a country and a city life; in the first they prevent the uneasy sensations of indolence, and afford a sublime pleasure in the taste they create for the beautiful, and the grand; in the latter, they make dissipation less an object of necessity, and consequently of interest.' It was one of Emily's earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes of nature; nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she most delighted; she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain's stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH.