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.