“HER prevision of all her sorrows, at least from the moment of St. Simeon’s prophecy, was so vivid and real, that, without a peculiar succour from the omnipotence of God, it must have separated her soul and body. She could not have lived under so dense a shadow. She could not have breathed in so thick a darkness. She must have been suffocated in the deep waters in which her soul was continually sinking. It was impossible in so perfect a creature that her reason should be perturbed. It was impossible that peace should ever be dislodged from a heart in such transcendently close union with God. But her beautiful life might have been, nay would have been, extinguished by excess of sorrow, unless God had worked a perpetual miracle to hinder this effect, just as through her whole life she was always on the point of dying from excess of love, and when His appointed moment came, and He withdrew His extraordinary succour, she did in fact die of simple love. What then must that sorrow have been, which required a standing miracle not to force body and soul asunder; and this too in a sinless soul, where remorse could never come, where doubt never harassed the judgment, unless it were once during the Three Days’ Loss, and where perpetual peace reigned amid the quietness and subordination of all the passions?”
— Fr. Frederick William Faber, The Foot of the Cross, or The Sorrows of Mary, 1886
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