ELIZABETH SARA SHEPPARD
You ask from me some particulars of the valued life so recently closed. Miss Sheppard was my friend of many years; I was with her to the last hour of her existence; but this is not the time for other than a brief notice of her career, and I comply with your request by sending you a slight memorial, hardly full enough for publication.
Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, the authoress of "Charles Auchester," "Counterparts," etc., was born at Blackheath, in England. Her father was a clergyman of unusual scholastic attainments, and took high honors at St. John's College, Oxford. Mr. Sheppard, on the mother's side, could number Hebrew ancestors, and this was the pride of his second daughter, the subject of this notice. Her love for the whole Hebrew race amounted to a passion, which found its expression in the romance of "Charles Auchester."
Very early she displayed a most decided poetic predisposition,—writing, when but ten years old, with surprising facility on every possible subject. No metre had any difficulties for her, and no theme seemed dull to her vivid intelligence,—her fancy being roused to action in a moment, by the barest hint given either by Nature or Art. Her first drama was written at this early age; it was called "Boadicea," and was composed immediately after she had been shown a field at Islington where this queen is said to have pitched her tent. Any one who asked was welcome to "some verses by 'Little Lizzie,'" written in her peculiar and fairy-like hand, (for when very young, her writing was remarkable for its extreme smallness and finish.) given with childlike simplicity, and artless ignorance of the worth of what she bestowed with a kiss and a smile.
Her poems were composed at once, with scarcely a correction. Her earlier ones, for the most part, were written at the corner of a large table, covered with the usual heaps of "after-lessons," in a school-room, where some twenty enfranchised girls were putting away copybooks, French grammars, etc., and getting out play-boxes and fancy-work, with the common amount of chatter and noise. Contrasted with such young persons, this child looked a strange, unearthly creature,—her large, dark gray eye full of inspiration, and every movement of her frame and tone of her voice instinct with delicate energy.
At the same age she would extemporize for hours on the organ, after wreathing the candlesticks with garden-flowers which she had brought in her hand,—their scent, she would say, suggesting the wild, sweet fancies which her fingers seemed able to call forth on the shortest notice. Persons straying into the church, as they often did, attracted by the sound of music, would declare the performer to be an experienced masculine musician.
When but a year older, she was an excellent Latin scholar, and, to use her father's words, she might then have "gone in for honors at Oxford." French she spoke and wrote fluently, besides reading Goethe and Schiller with avidity, and translating as fast as she read,—Schiller having always the preference. At fourteen she began the study of Hebrew, of which language she was a worshipper, and could not at that early age even let Greek alone. Her wonderful power of seizing on the genius of a language, and becoming for the time a foreigner in spirit, was noticed by all her teachers; her ear was so delicate that no subtile inflection ever escaped her, nor any idiom.
And now she surprised her most intimate friend by the present of a prose story, sent to her, when absent, in chapters by the post. This was succeeded by many other tales, and finally by "Charles Auchester,"—which romance, as well as that of "Counterparts," was written in the few hours she could command after her teaching was over: for in her mother's school she taught music the greater part of every day,—both theoretically and practically,—and also Latin.
Her health, always delicate, suffered wofully from this constant strain, and caused her to experience the most painful exhaustion, which, however, she never permitted to be an excuse for shirking an occupation naturally distasteful to her,—and doubly so, that through all the din of practice her thousand fancies clamored like caged birds eager for liberty.
The moment her hour of leisure came, she would hide herself with her best loved work in the quietest corner she could find; sometimes it was a little room in-doors, sometimes the summer-house, sometimes under a large mulberry-tree; and thus "Charles Auchester" and "Counterparts" were written, the former without one correction,—sheet after sheet, flung from her hand in the ardor of composition, being picked up and read by the friend who was in all her literary secrets. At last this same friend, finding she had no thought of publication, in a moment of playful daring, persuaded her to send the manuscript to Benjamin Disraeli, and he introduced it to his publishers. I quote from his letter to the author, which may not be out of place here:—