The discrimination of character exercised by Miss Sheppard is very wonderful. Many as are the figures on her stage, they are never repeated, and they are all as separate, as finely edged and bevelled, as gems. The people grow under her pen,—whether you take Auchester, developing so when first thrown on himself in Germany, and becoming at length the rare type of manhood which he presents,—or the one change wrought by years in Miss Benette, just the addition of something that would have been impossible in any child, a deepened sweetness, that completest touch of the perfect woman, "like perfume from unseen flowers, diffusing itself when the wind awakens, while we know neither whence the windy fragrance comes nor whither it flows." Perhaps this characterization is most noticeable in "Counterparts," which she called her small party of opposing temperaments: Salome, so gracious; Rose, like the spirit of a sunbeam; Sarona, so keen and incisive, his passion confronting Bernard's sweetness; and Cecilia, who, it is easy to conjecture, wrote the book. I have always fancied that some mystic trine was chorded by three beings who, with all their separate gifts, possessed an equal power and sweetness,—Raphael, Shelley, and Mendelssohn. And perhaps the same occurred more emphatically to Miss Sheppard, for after Seraphael she drew Bernard,—Bernard, who is exceeded by none in the whole range of romance. "Counterparts" is a novel of ideal life; it is the land of one's dreams and one's delights; its dwellers are more real to us than the men and women into whose eyes we look upon the street, they haunt us and enrapture us, they breathe about us an atmosphere of gentle and delicious melancholy like the soft azure haze spread over meadow and hills by the faint south-wind. With fresh incident on every leaf, with a charm in every scene, its spell is enthralling, and its chapters are enchanted. There is no fault in it; nothing can be more perfect, nothing more beautiful. One may put "Consuelo" side by side with "Charles Auchester," but what novel in the wide world deserves a place by "Counterparts"? It was worth having lived, to have once thrown broadcast such handfuls of beauty.
Between the publication of Miss Sheppard's second book and "Rumour" two others were issued,—"Beatrice Reynolds" and "The Double Coronet,"—for which one wishes there were some younger sister, some Acton or Ellis, to whom to impute them,—evidently the result of illness, weariness, and physical weakness, perhaps wrung from her by inexorable necessity, but which should never have been written. In the last, in spite of its very Radcliffean air, there are truly terrible things, as Gutilyn and his green-eyed child bear witness; but the other reminds one, as nearly as a modern book may do so, of no less a model than the redoubtable "Thaddeus of Warsaw!" But Miss Sheppard had already written all that at present there was to say; rest was imperative till the intermittent springs again overflowed. "Rumour," which approached the old excellence, was no result of a soul's ardor,—merely very choice work. Notwithstanding, everything is precious that filters through such a medium, and in these three publications she found opportunity for expressing many a conviction and for weaving many a fancy; moreover, she was afraid of no one, and never minced matters, therefore they are interspersed with criticisms: she praised Charlotte Bronté, condemned George Sand, ridiculed Chopin, reproved Elizabeth Browning, and satirized "Punch." In her last book there was a great, but scarcely a good change of style, she having been obliged by its thinness to pepper the page with Italics; still these are only marks of a period of transition, and in spite of them the book is priceless. Judging from internal evidence, she here appears to have frequented more society, and the contact of this carelessly marrying world with her own pure perception of right struck the spark which kindled into "Almost a Heroine." Here awakens again that graceful humor which is the infallible sign of health, and which was so lightly inwrought through the earlier volumes. Reading it over, one is struck with its earnestness, its truth and noble courage,—one feels that lofty social novels, which might have infused life and principle and beauty into the mass of custom, were promised in this, and are now no longer a possibility. And herein are the readers of this magazine especially affected; since there is no reason to suppose that the work promised and begun by her for these pages would not have been the peer of her best production, 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.
ASTRAEA AT THE CAPITOL.
ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 1862.
When first I saw our banner wave
Above the nation's council-hall,
I heard beneath its marble wall
The clanking fetters of the slave!
In the foul market-place I stood,
And saw the Christian mother sold,
And childhood with its locks of gold,
Blue-eyed and fair with Saxon blood.
I shut my eyes, I held my breath,
And, smothering down the wrath and shame
That set my Northern blood aflame,
Stood silent—where to speak was death.
Beside me gloomed the prison-cell
Where wasted one in slow decline
For uttering simple words of mine,
And loving freedom all too well.