Her library of poetry is said to have consisted only of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and Macpherson's Ossian; but hymns must have filled her ear with the ring of rhyme, for she was continually versifying, sometimes passages of Scripture, sometimes Ossian, long before she was halfway through her teens.

Very foolish, sing-song, emotional specimens they are, but notable as showing the bent of nature that forms itself into heroism.

Her family were Baptists, and she was sixteen when the sense of religion came on her so strongly as to lead her to seek baptism.
Remarkably enough, the thought of the ignorance of the heathen, and the desire to teach them, began to haunt her from that time, and is recorded in the last page of her childish journal, dated a month later than her baptism.
In fact, her zeal seems to have been pretty strong towards the persons around her.

While staying at a friend's house, she found a pack of cards left by a young man on the table, and wrote on it the text beginning, "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth," &c.

Hearing that the owner was very curious to know the perpetrator, she wrote down this verse for him: "And wouldst thou know what friend sincere Reminds thee of thy day of doom?
Repress the wish, yet thou mayst hear She shed for thee a pitying tear, For thine are paths of gloom." She also says that she had been for six weeks engaged, with the assistance of a gentleman, in working out proofs of the immortality of the soul, apart from those in Scripture.