As Lucy was not able to pay the full tuition, the principal, Miss Fobes, arranged that she should be both student and teacher, thus helping to defray her expenses. She entered the school in September, 1849, and studied, in earnest, history, metaphysics, English literature, and higher mathematics, and laid the foundation for a thorough education.
Her schoolmates remember with pleasure the beauty of her lite at Monticello. They speak of the gentleness and peculiar sweetness of her character. Nothing coarse or mean could be associated with her. Being older than the other girls she was looked up to with reverence by them. Her singular purity of mind was illustrated by a remark to one of her companions, when they were talking about the Christian life,--“I never knew there was any other way to live.” One of her schoolmates writes: “I felt homesick, until one day I was introduced to a large, fair-faced woman, and looked up to meet a pair of happy blue eyes smiling down upon me, so full of sweet human kindness that the clouds fell straight away. And from that day the kindness never failed me--I think it never failed anyone. ‘The sunshine of her face’ were words that went out in many of my letters in those days.”
She studied industriously each subject of the course. Her note-books contain full extracts from the authors she was reading, with long comments by herself. Those on philosophy indicate a mind naturally delighting in speculative questions; and when her reasoning touches upon theology, she seems especially in earnest. History appealed to her imagination, and she seized upon the more dramatic incidents for comment. English literature opened a new world of thought to her, and she studied enthusiastically the origin and growth of poetry. In these studies of English it was first suggested to her that there was an art of versification, which could be cultivated. From this time her lines conform more to poetic rules, her ear for music being supplemented by a knowledge of metre.
There was one subject she could not master,--mathematics: “I am working on spherical trigonometry, just now. I don’t fancy it much; it needs a clearer head than mine to take in such abstract matters as the sides and angles of the triangle that can be imagined, but not seen.” She would exclaim, when studying Conic Sections, that she could see all the beauty, and feel all the poetry, but could not take the steps. When, however, after great work, she did understand a proposition, she accepted it as an eternal fact which God used for infinite purposes.