The English poetess and philanthropist, Adelaide Anne Procter was born in London on the 30th of October 1825 and died in London on the 2nd of February 1864. The eldest daughter of the poet Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall") and Anne Benson Skepper she showed precocious intelligence from her earliest years, and attained considerable proficiency in French, German, and Italian, as well as in music and drawing, and she was a great reader. The novelist Charles Dickens published her poems in his periodicals Household Words and All the year Round, and later they were published in book form. Dickens spoke highly of Procter’s quick intelligence. By his account, the young Procter mastered without difficulty the subjects to which she turned her attention: �When she was quite a young child, she learnt with facility several of the problems of Euclid. As she grew older, she acquired the French, Italian, and German languages … piano-forte … [and] drawing. But, as soon as she had completely vanquished the difficulties of any one branch of study, it was her way to lose interest in it, and pass to another.� Some of her poems, for example, "Per Pacem ad Lucem" and "Thankfulness" are so devotional that they are in use as hymns and anthems and in 1877 Arthur Sullivan set her poem A Lost Chord as a song, which was an immediate success.