titution, 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 bind