Frances Ridley Havergal

Frances Ridley Havergal was the daughter of an English clergyman who composed hymn tunes, lost her mother at eleven, and grew up reading Hebrew and Greek and memorizing whole books of the Bible. She was a trained singer and pianist who could have had a concert career and did not want one. Staying at a house party in 1874 where she had prayed that everyone present would be converted, she saw it happen over five days, and could not sleep for joy; that night she wrote the consecration hymn couplet by couplet.

Four years later she read her own line about silver and gold, packed up her jewelry - including a treasured collection of family pieces - and sent it to a missionary society, keeping only a brooch she wore. Her health was frail all her life and she died at forty-two of peritonitis, telling her sister that going was too good to be true.