some bold and beautiful elucidation of one of the many mysteries in life; for the lack of appreciation in England was no longer to concern her, and, unshackled and unrestrained, she could feel herself surrounded by the genial atmosphere of loving listeners.  But perhaps it was not lawful that she should further impart these great secrets which she had learned.  “I sometimes think,” she murmurs, “when women try to rise too high either in their deeds or their desires, that the spirit which bade them so rise sinks back beneath the weakness of their earthly constitution, and never appeals again,—­or else that the spirit, being too strong, does away with the mortal altogether,—­they die, or rather they live again.”  It was like forecasting her own horoscope.  All suffering seems to have descended upon her,—­and there are some natures whose power of enjoyment, so infinite, yet so deep as to be hidden, is balanced only by as infinite a power to endure; she learned anew, as she says, and intensely, “what a long dream of misery is life from which health’s bloom has been brushed,—­that irreparable bloom,—­and how far more terrible is the doom of those in whom the nerve-life has been untoned.”  Sun-stroke and fever, vibration between opiates at night and tonics at noon,—­but the flame was too strong to fan away lightly, it must burn itself out, the spirit was too quenchless,—­pain, wretchedness, exhaustion.  On one of those delicious days that came in the middle of this year’s April,—­warmth and fresh earth-smells breathing all about,—­the wide sprays of the lofty boughs lying tinged in rosy purple, a web-like tracery upon the sky whose azure was divine,—­the air itself lucid and mellow, as if some star had been dissolved within it,—­on such a day the little foreign letter came, telling that at length balm had dropped upon the weary eyelids,—­Elizabeth Sheppard was dead.

But in the midst of regret,—­since all lovely examples lend their strength, since they give such grace even to the stern facts of suffering and death, and since there are too few such records on Heaven’s scroll,—­be glad to know that for every throb of anguish, for every swooning lapse of pain, there was one beside her with tenderest hands, most careful eyes, most yearning and revering heart,—­one into whose sacred grief our intrusion is denied, but the remembrance of whose long and deep devotion shall endure while there are any to tell how Severn watched the Roman death-bed of Keats!

It is impossible to estimate our loss, because it draws upon infinitude; there was so much growth yet possible to this soul; to all that she was not she might yet have enlarged; and while at first her audience had limits, she would in a calm and prosperous future have become that which she herself described in saying that a really vast genius who is as vast an artist will affect all classes, “touch even the uninitiated with trembling and delight, and penetrate even the ignorant with strong, if transient spell, as the galvanic energy binds each and all who embrace in the chain-circle of grasping hands, in the shock of perfect sympathy.”  Nevertheless, she has served Art incalculably,—­Art, which is the interpretation of God in Nature.  And if, as she believed, in spiritual things Beauty is the gage of immortality, the pledge may yet be redeemed on earth, ever forbidding her memory to die.