THE LIFE OF
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
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Mrs. Nightingale and her daughters
1828
from a water-colour drawing in the possession of Mrs. Cunliffe

THE LIFE
OF
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

BY
SIR EDWARD COOK
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
(1820–1861)
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1913
COPYRIGHT

PREFACE

Men and women are divided, in relation to their papers, into hoarders and scatterers. Miss Nightingale was a hoarder, and as she lived to be 90 the accumulation of papers, stored in her house at the time of her death, was very great. The papers referring to years up to 1861 had been neatly done up by herself, and it was evident that not everything had been kept. After that date, time and strength to sort and weed had been wanting, and Miss Nightingale seems to have thrown little away. Even soiled sheets of blotting-paper, on which she had made notes in pencil, were preserved. By a Will executed in 1896 she had directed that all her letters, papers, and manuscripts, with some specific exceptions, should be destroyed. By a Codicil executed in the following year she revoked this direction, and bequeathed the letters, papers, and manuscripts to her cousin, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter. After her death the papers were sorted chronologically by his direction, and they have formed the principal foundation of this Memoir.

Of expressly autobiographical notes, Miss Nightingale left very few. At the date of the Codicil above mentioned she seems to have contemplated the probability of some authoritative record of her life; for in that year she wrote a short summary of what she called “My Responsibility to India,” detailing her relations with successive Secretaries of State, Governors-General, and other administrators. Her memory in these matters was still accurate, for the summary is fully borne out by letters and other papers of the several dates: it adds some personal details. In private letters she sometimes recounted, at later times, episodes or experiences in her life, but such references are few. Nor, except for a few years, did Miss Nightingale keep any formal diary; and during the Crimean episode she was too incessantly busy with her multitudinous duties to find time for many private notes.

The principal authority for Miss Nightingale's Life is thus the collection of papers aforesaid, and these are very copious in information. The records, in one sort or another, of her earlier years are full. The papers relating to her work during the Crimean War are voluminous, and I have supplemented the study of these by consulting the official documents concerning Miss Nightingale's mission which are preserved, among War Office papers, in the Public Record Office. Her papers relating to public affairs during the years 1856 to 1861 are also very voluminous. After the latter date she seems, as already stated, to have kept almost everything, even every advertisement, that she received. She often made notes for important letters that she sent, and sometimes kept copies of them. Of official documents, of printed memoranda, pamphlets, reports, and returns, she accumulated an immense collection. And though she was not a regular diarist, she was in the habit of jotting down on sheets of notepaper her engagements, impressions, thoughts, meditations, as also in many cases reports of conversations.

The collection of letters received by Miss Nightingale, and of her notes for letters sent by her, has been supplemented, through the kindness of many of her correspondents or their representatives, by letters which were received from her. I am more especially indebted in this respect to the care of the late Sir Douglas Galton, whose docketed collection of letters from Miss Nightingale, taken in conjunction with a long series of his letters to her, forms a main authority for much of the record of her activity in public affairs. Her letters to Julius and Mary Mohl, returned to her after the death of the latter, are, in another way, of peculiar interest. I am particularly indebted, among the lenders of letters addressed to nursing friends, to Miss Pringle and to the father of the late Mrs. Daniel Morris (Miss Rachel Williams). Miss Pringle has also favoured me with personal reminiscences.

For permission to print letters written to Miss Nightingale, I am indebted to many of her relations, friends, and correspondents, or their representatives; to so many, indeed, that I ask them to accept here a general acknowledgment. I am especially indebted to the King, who has been pleased to permit the publication of letters from Queen Victoria and some other members of the Royal Family. The German Emperor has graciously given a like permission in the case of correspondence with the Empress Frederick. The Dowager Grand Duchess (Luise) of Baden has allowed me to quote from a long series of letters addressed by her to Miss Nightingale.

Next to the letters and other papers, above described, the most valuable material for the Life of Miss Nightingale is contained in her own printed writings—many of them published, some (and these, from the biographical point of view, the most important) privately printed. In the case of the Crimean War, material under both of these heads is particularly abundant. Her published Notes on Hospitals and Notes on Nursing and other works relating to those subjects, together with her privately circulated Addresses to Probationers, supplement her private records. For her inner life, her privately printed book, Suggestions for Thought, is of special importance.

A List of Miss Nightingale's Printed Writings (whether published or privately circulated) is given at the end of the second volume (Appendix A). My purpose in compiling this List was biographical illustration, not bibliographical minuteness. I have not included every scrap from Miss Nightingale's pen which has appeared in print, but have given every piece which is directly or indirectly referred to in the Memoir, or which is of any importance. The List will, I hope, serve a double purpose. It enables me to abbreviate in the text the references to my authorities; and it provides, in chronological order, a conspectus of Miss Nightingale's varied activities, so far as they were reflected in her printed writings.

Lastly, there is much biographical material, not only in Blue-books and official reports, but in writings about Miss Nightingale. Except in the case of the Crimean War, where many eye-witnesses recorded their observations or impressions, this material is not all of great value. Throughout her subsequent life, Miss Nightingale was screened from the public gaze; a somewhat legendary figure grew up, and it is that which for the most part appears in books about her. This, however, is a subject fully dealt with in an Introductory chapter. In Appendix B I give a short List of Writings about Miss Nightingale. Here, again, the purpose is not bibliographical. There is a great mass of such writing, and a complete list would have been altogether outside the scope of a biography. I have included only first-hand authorities or such other books, etc., as for one reason or another (explained in the notes upon each item) seemed relevant to the Memoir. This second List also serves the purpose of simplifying references in the text.

In a third Appendix (C) I have enumerated the principal portraits of Miss Nightingale. Notes on those reproduced in this book will there be found. I am indebted to the kindness of Sir William Richmond and Sir Harry Verney for the inclusion of the portrait which forms the frontispiece to the second volume, and to Mrs. Cunliffe for the frontispiece to the present volume.

To Miss Nightingale's executors I am indebted for the confidence which they have shown in entrusting her Papers to my discretion. A biography is worth nothing unless it is sincere. The aim of the present book has been to tell the truth about the subject of it, and I have done my work under no conscious temptation to suppress, exaggerate, extenuate, or distort. From Miss Nightingale's executors, and from other of her friends and relations, I have received help and information which has been of the greatest assistance. More especially I am indebted to her cousin, Mrs. Vaughan Nash, who has been good enough to read my book, both in manuscript and in proof, and who has favoured me throughout with valuable information, corrections, suggestions, and criticisms. This obligation makes it the more incumbent upon me to add that for any faults in the book, whether of commission or of omission, I alone must bear the blame.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTORY

Among Miss Nightingale's memoranda on books and reading, there is this injunction: “The preface of a book ought to set forth the importance of what it is going to treat of, so that the reader may understand what he is reading for.” The saying is typical of the methodical and positive spirit which, as we shall learn, was one of the dominant strains in Miss Nightingale's work and character. She wanted to know at every stage precisely what a person, or a book, or an institution was driving at. “Of all human sounds,” she said, “I think the words I don't know are the saddest.” Unless a book had something of definite importance to say, it had better, she thought, not be written; and in order to save the reader's time and fix his attention, he should be told at once wherein the significance of the book consists. This, though it may be a hard saying, is perhaps not unwholesome even to biographers. At any rate, as Miss Nightingale's biographer, I am moved to obey her injunction. I propose, therefore, in this Introductory chapter to state wherein, as I conceive, the significance and importance of Miss Nightingale's life consists, and what the work was that she did in the world.

I

“In the course of a life's experience such as scarcely any one has ever had, I have always found,” said Miss Nightingale,[1] “that no one ever deserves his or her character. Be it better or worse than the real one, it is always unlike the real one.” Of no one is this saying more true than of herself. “It has been your fate,” said Mr. Jowett to her once, “to become a Legend in your lifetime.” Now, nothing is more persistent than a legend; and the legend of Florence Nightingale became fixed early in her life—at a time, indeed, antecedent to that at which her best work in the world, as she thought, had begun. The popular imagination of Miss Nightingale is of a girl of high degree who, moved by a wave of pity, forsook the pleasures of fashionable life for the horrors of the Crimean War; who went about the hospitals of Scutari with a lamp, scattering flowers of comfort and ministration; who retired at the close of the war into private life, and lived thenceforth in the seclusion of an invalid's room—a seclusion varied only by good deeds to hospitals and nurses and by gracious and sentimental pieties. I do not mean, of course, that this was all that anybody knew or wrote about her. Any such suggestion would be far from the truth. But the popular idea of Florence Nightingale's life has been based on some such lines as I have indicated, and the general conception of her character is to this day founded upon them. The legend was fixed by Longfellow's poem and Miss Yonge's Golden Deeds. Its growth was favoured by the fact of Miss Nightingale's seclusion, by the hidden, almost the secretive, manner in which she worked, by her shrinking from publicity, by her extreme reticence about herself. It is only now, when her Papers are accessible, that her real life can be known. There are some elements of truth in the popular legend, but it is so remote from the whole truth as to convey in general impression everything but the truth. The real Florence Nightingale was very different from the legendary, but also greater. Her life was built on larger lines, her work had more importance, than belong to the legend.

The Crimean War was not the first thing, and still less was it the last, that is significant in Miss Nightingale's life. The story of her earlier years is that of the building up of a character. It shows us a girl of high natural ability and of considerable attractions feeling her way to an ideal alike in practice and in speculation. Having found it, she was thrown into revolt against the environment of her home. We shall see her pursuing her ideal with consistent, though with self-torturing, tenacity against alike the obstacles and the temptations of circumstance. She had already served an apprenticeship when the call to the Crimea came. It was a call not to “sacrifice,” but to the fulfilment of her dearest wishes for a life of active usefulness. Such is the theme of the First Part, which I have called “Aspiration.”

Many other women have passed through similar experiences. But there is special significance in them in the case of Florence Nightingale—a significance both historic and personal. The glamour that surrounded her service in the Crimea, the wide-world publicity that was given to her name and deeds, invested with peculiar importance her fight for freedom. To do “as Florence Nightingale did” became an object of imitation which the well-to-do world was henceforth readier to condone, or even to approve; and thus the story of Miss Nightingale's earlier years is the history of a pioneer, on one side, in the emancipation of women.

For the understanding of her own later life, the earlier years are all-important. They give the clue to her character, and explain much that would otherwise be puzzling or confused. Through great difficulties and at a heavy price she had purchased her birthright—her ideal of self-expression in work. On her return from the Crimea she was placed, on the one hand, owing to her fame, in a position of special opportunity; on the other hand, owing to illness, in a position of special disability. She shaped her life henceforward so as to make these two factors conform to the continued fulfilment of her ideal. I need not here forestall what subsequent chapters will abundantly illustrate. I will only say that the resultant effect was a manner of life and work, both extraordinary, and, to me at least, of the greatest interest.

The Second Part of the Memoir is devoted to the Crimean War. The popular conception with regard to Miss Nightingale's work during this episode in her life is not untrue so far as it goes, but it is amazingly short of the whole truth as now ascertainable from her Papers. The popular imagination pictures Florence Nightingale at Scutari and in the Crimea as “the ministering angel.” And such in very truth she was. But the deeper significance of her work in the Crimean War lies elsewhere. It was as Administrator and Reformer, more than as Angel, that she showed her peculiar powers. Queen Victoria, with native shrewdness and a touch of humour, hit off the truth about Miss Nightingale's services in the Crimea in concise words: “Such a clear head. I wish we had her at the War Office.”

The influence of Miss Nightingale's service in the Crimea was great. Some of it is obvious, and on the moral side Longfellow's poem said the first, and the last, word. She may also be accounted, if not the founder, yet the promoter of Female Nursing in war, and the Red Cross Societies throughout the world are, as we shall hear, the direct outcome of her labours in the Crimea. The indirect, and less obvious, results were in many spheres. From a sick-room in the West End of London Miss Nightingale played a part—and a much larger part than could be known without access to her Papers—in reforming the sanitary administration of the British army, in reconstructing hospitals throughout the world, in founding the modern art of nursing, in setting up a sanitary administration in India, and in promoting various other reforms in that country.

Miss Nightingale's return from the Crimea, it will thus be seen, was not the end of her active life. In a sense it was the beginning. The nursing at Scutari and in the Crimea was an episode. The fame which she shunned, but which nevertheless came to her, gave her a starting-point for doing work which was destined, as she hoped, and as in large measure was granted, to be of permanent service to her country and the world. The first chapter of the Third Part shows her laying her plans for the health of the British soldier, and the subsequent chapters tell what followed. This is the period of Miss Nightingale's close co-operation with Sidney Herbert. To the writer this later phase of Miss Nightingale's life—with its ingenious adjustment of means to ends, its masterful resourcefulness, its incessant industry, and then with its perpetual struggle against physical weakness and its extraordinary power of devoted concentration—has seemed not less interesting than the Crimean episode.

The Fourth Part describes, as its main themes, the work which Miss Nightingale did, concurrently with that described in the preceding Part, as Hospital Reformer and the Founder of Modern Nursing. Other chapters introduce two topics which might at first sight seem widely separate, but which were yet closely associated in Miss Nightingale's mind. They deal with her, respectively, as a Passionate Statistician and as a Religious Thinker. The nature of her speculations is fully explained in the latter chapters, and elsewhere in the memoir. It will be seen that Miss Nightingale had thought out a scheme of religious belief which widely differed from the creeds of Christian orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant, but which yet admitted of accommodation to much of their language and formularies. It admitted also, as will appear in due course, of close alliance with mysticism. Miss Nightingale believed intensely in a Personal God and in personal religion. The language which expressed most adequately to her the sense of union with God was the language of the Greek and Christian mystics. But “law” was to her “the thought of God”; union with God meant co-operation with Him towards human perfectibility; and for the discovery of “the thought of God” statistics were to her mind an indispensable means.

In the Fifth Part we are introduced to a new interest in Miss Nightingale's life, a new sphere of her work. For forty years she worked at Indian questions. She took up the subject at first through interest in the army. It was a natural supplement to her efforts for the health of the British soldier at home, to make a like attempt on behalf of the army in India. Gradually she was drawn into other questions, and she became a keen Indian reformer all along the line. Her assiduity, her persistence, her ingenuity were as marked in this sphere as in others; it was only her immediate success that was less.

In relation to the primary object with which she began her Indian campaigns, Miss Nightingale's life and work have great importance. The Royal Commission of 1859–63, which was due to her, and the measures taken in consequence of its Report, were the starting-point of a new era in sanitary improvement for the army. The results have been most salutary. Miss Nightingale's friendship with Lord Stanley and with Sir John Lawrence here served her somewhat as that with Mr. Herbert served in the earlier campaign. In the wider sphere of Indian sanitation generally Miss Nightingale's efforts were not so successful. The field was perhaps too vast, the conditions were too adverse, for any great and immediate success to be possible. Yet this and her other efforts for India were the part of Miss Nightingale's life and work to which she attached most importance, and by the record of which she set most store. Even in the Will (afterwards revoked) directing her Papers to be destroyed, she made exception of those relating to India; and, as already stated in the preface, one of her few pieces of autobiographical record related to her Indian work. Perhaps it was the special affection which a mother often feels for the least robust or least successful child. Perhaps it was that she took long views; and that, foreseeing a future time when many of the reforms for which she had toiled might be accomplished, she desired to be remembered as a pioneer. “Sanitation,” said a high authority in 1894, “is the Cinderella of the Indian administrative family.”[2] The difficulty of finding money and a reluctance to introduce Western reforms in advance of Eastern opinion are objections with which we shall often meet in the correspondence of Indian officials with Miss Nightingale, and they are still raised in the present day.[3] On the other hand, the Under-Secretary for India, in his Budget Statement for 1913, declared that “the service which has the strongest claim after education on the resources of the Government is sanitation,” and explained that “the Budget estimate of expenditure for sanitation comes this year to nearly £2,000,000, showing an increase of 112 per cent over the expenditure of three years ago.” So perhaps Cinderella is to go to the ball; if ever the glass slipper is found, let it be remembered, as this Memoir will show, that Miss Nightingale was the good fairy.

Her Indian work continued as long as she was able to work at all, and from 1862 onwards it forms one of the recurring themes in our story. The Sixth Part, while continuing that subject, introduces another sphere in which Miss Nightingale's life and work have important significance. From the reform of Hospital Nursing she turned, in conjunction with the late Mr. William Rathbone, to the reform of workhouse nursing. And as one thing led to another, it will be seen that Miss Nightingale deserves to be remembered also as a Poor Law Reformer.

The Seventh Part comprises the last thirty-eight years of Miss Nightingale's life (1872–1910), and a word or two may here be said to explain an apparent alteration of scale. In a biography the scale must be proportionate not to the number of the years, but to their richness in characteristic significance. After 1872, the year in which (as Miss Nightingale put it) she went “out of office,” her life was less full than theretofore in new activities. The germinant seeds had all been sown. But these later years, though they have admitted of more summary treatment, were full of interest. The chapters in which they are recorded deal first with Miss Nightingale's literary work, and more especially with her studies in Plato and the Christian mystics. These studies were in part a result of her close friendship of thirty years with Mr. Jowett. Then, too, occasion is found for an endeavour to portray Miss Nightingale as the Mother-Chief (for so they called her) of the Nurses. It is only by access to her enormous correspondence in this sort that the range and extent of her personal influence can be measured. Her ideal of the nursing vocation stands out very clearly from the famous “Nurses' Battle” which occupied much of her later years. She found an opportunity during the same period to start an important experiment in Rural Hygiene. At the same time she was preaching indefatigably the need of Health missionaries in Indian villages. And then came the end. To the time of labour, there succeeds in every life, says Ruskin, “the time of death; which in happy lives is very short, but always a time.” In the case of Miss Nightingale the time was long. She lived for many years after the power to labour was gone.

II

So much, by way of preface, in explanation of the significance of Miss Nightingale's life and work. But this book endeavours to depict a character, as well as to record a career. There has been much discussion, in our days as in others, of the proper scope and method of biography, and various models are held up, in one sense or another, to practitioners in this difficult art. The questions are propounded, whether biography should describe a person's life or his character? his work or how he did it? If the person did anything worthy of record, a biography should, surely, describe alike the life and the character, the work and the methods. The biographer may fail in his attempt; but in the case of Miss Nightingale the attempt is peculiarly necessary, because all that she did and the manner in which she did it were, as it has seemed to me, characteristic of a strongly-marked personality behind them.

This book is, however, a biography and not a history. It is not a history of the Crimean War, nor of nursing, nor of Indian administration. Something on all these matters will be found in it; but only so much of detail as was necessary to place Miss Nightingale's work in its true light and to exhibit her characteristic methods. So, also, many other persons will pass across the stage—persons drawn from a great many different classes, occupations, walks in life; but the book does not aim at giving a detailed picture of “Miss Nightingale's circle.” Her relations, her friends, her acquaintances, her correspondents only concern us here in so far as their dealings with her affected her work, or illustrate her character.

Here, again—to revert to what has been said above—it will be found, I think, that this book possesses a certain significance as correcting, or supplementing, a popular legend. A preacher, in an obituary sermon upon Miss Nightingale, said that all her work was done “by force of simple goodness.” Assuredly Miss Nightingale was a good woman, and there was also a certain simplicity about her. But there was much else. A man of affairs, who in the course of a long and varied life had come in contact with many of the acutest intellects and greatest administrators of the time, said of Miss Nightingale that hers was the clearest brain he had ever known in man or woman. Strength of head was quite as marked in her as goodness of heart, and she had at least as much of adroitness as of simplicity. Her character was in fact curiously many-sided. A remarkable variety of interests, motives, methods will be found coming into play in the course of this record. The Florence Nightingale who will be shown in it—by her acts, her methods, her sayings, her ways of looking at things and people—is a very different person from Santa Filomena. Miss Nightingale has been given a place among the saints in the popular calendars of many nations; and she deserves the canonisation, but not entirely for the popular reasons. Her character, as I have endeavoured to depict it, was stronger, more spacious, and, as I have felt, more lovable than that of The Lady with the Lamp.

Footnotes:

[1] In a letter to Madame Mohl, December 13, 1871.

[2] Sir Auckland Colvin in the Journal of the Society of Arts, May 11, 1894, p. 515.

[3] As, for instance, in some of the speeches in the House of Lords on June 9, 1913, and in a leading article in the Times of the following day. The speech of Lord Midleton, in introducing the subject, was, on the other hand, upon Miss Nightingale's lines, being founded upon the Report of her Royal Commission of 1859–63. Some pages (194–197) in Mr. George Peel's The Future of England (1911) are on similar lines.

[PART I]
ASPIRATION
(1820–1854)

I go to prove my soul!
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive—what time, what circuit first,
I ask not; but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time.

Browning: Paracelsus.

CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION
(1820–1839)

I found her in her chamber reading Phaedon Platonis in Greek, and that with as much pleasure as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Bocace.
—Roger Ascham.

To the tender sentiment and popular adoration that gathered around the subject of this Memoir, something perhaps was added by the beauty of a name which linked together the City of the Flowers and the music of the birds. Her surname suggested to Longfellow the title of the poem which has carried home to the hearts of thousands in two continents a lesson of her life. The popularity of “Florence”—in the Middle Ages a masculine name—as a Christian name for English girls is noted by the historian of that subject as due to association with the heroine of the Crimea.

Both of her names were the result of circumstance. Her father came of the old Derbyshire family of Shore of Tapton, and changed his name in 1815 from William Edward Shore to William Edward Nightingale on succeeding to the property of his mother's uncle, Peter Nightingale of Lea, in the same county. Mr. William Nightingale was fond of travel, and the close of the French war, shortly before his marriage (1818), had thrown the Continent open to the grand tour. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale's only children, two daughters, were born during a sojourn in Italy. The elder was born at Naples in 1819, and was named, firstly, Frances, after her mother, and, secondly, after the old Greek settlement on the site of her birthplace, Parthenope. She afterwards became the second wife of Sir Harry Verney.[4] The younger daughter, the subject of this Memoir, was also named after her birthplace. She was born at Florence on May 12, 1820, in the Villa Colombaia, near the Porta Romana, as a memorial-tablet now affixed to the house records; and there on the 4th of July she was baptized by Dr. Trevor, Prebendary of Chester. The place-names became in familiar intercourse “Parthe” or “Pop,” and “Flo.”

“The surprises of sainthood,” said a speaker at a Congress on Eugenics, “are no less remarkable than those of genius. St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and Florence Nightingale could no more have been predicted from their ancestry than Napoleon, Beethoven, Michael Angelo, or Shakespeare.” But the peculiarities of tissue on which some physical characteristics are held to depend can, at any rate, be inherited. Florence Nightingale's mother was one of the eleven children of William Smith of Parndon Hall, Essex, of whom Sir James Stephen said: “When he had nearly completed four score years, he could still gratefully acknowledge that he had no remembrance of any bodily pain or illness, and that of the very numerous family of which he was the head every member still lived to support and gladden his old age.” This statement is not absolutely correct, for one child did not long survive its birth; but of the other sons and daughters of William Smith, none died at an earlier age than 69, two lived to be more than 75, six to be more than 80, and one to be more than 90. This last was Frances, Mrs. Nightingale, who lived to be 92. On the father's side there was longevity also. Mr. Nightingale himself lived to be 80. His mother lived to be 95; he had an aunt who lived to be 90; and “your uncle,” wrote his father, “young at 82, enters into politics of the present moment with all the ardour of 22.” Of the children of Mr. and Mrs. William Nightingale, Parthenope lived to be 75, and Florence, though (or, in part, perhaps, because) she lived for 53 years the life of an invalid, attained the age of 90.

Florence Nightingale, whether saint or not, was certainly conscious of a “call”; but there was nothing in her descent or inheritance which encouraged her parents to allow it to become readily effectual. Because she was a woman, her early life was one long struggle for liberation from circumstance and social prepossessions. Yet there were features in her mental equipment and intellectual outlook which may well have been inherited, and which certainly owed much to environment. Sir James Stephen adds to the remarks quoted above that if William Smith “had gone mourning all his days, he could scarcely have acquired a more tender pity for the miserable, or have laboured more habitually for their relief.” In politics he was a follower of Fox. He was a friend of Wilberforce, with whom he co-operated in the House of Commons in the Abolitionist and other humanitarian movements. Of Wilberforce, as of Thomas Clarkson, “he possessed the almost brotherly love, and of all their fellow-labourers there was none who was more devoted to their cause, or whom they more entirely trusted.”[5] In religion a Unitarian, he was a stout defender of liberty of thought and conscience, a persistent opponent of religious tests and disabilities. The liberal opinions, alike in Church and State, which were thus traditional in the family of Florence Nightingale's mother, were shared by that of her father. Her grandfather Shore, in a letter to his son in 1818, referred to “one of the finest pieces of eloquence either in ancient or modern times, given by Sir Samuel Romilly in the Court of Chancery on a motion respecting the right of Jews to the benefit of a charity in Bedford. It does honour to the man and to human nature.” Florence Nightingale's father was also a Unitarian; and in politics he was a Whig. “How I hate Tories,” he wrote to his wife; and in another letter, after the election of 1835, in which the hated ones had gained ground, he explained that they were mighty only “by Beer, Brandy, and Money.” The Whigs, as is well known, were not all lacking in the latter equipment for political success, and Mr. Nightingale was a frequent subscriber to electoral funds on the Whig side. He was an ardent supporter of Parliamentary Reform. He held that “Bentham has taught great moral truth more effectually than all the Christian divines.” At a later time he was a follower of Lord Palmerston, of whom he was also a neighbour in the country. One of the earliest notices which I find of Florence Nightingale's interest in politics is in a letter from her father describing a meeting at Romsey to which he had taken her. “Florence,” he says, “approved very much Palmerston's exposition of his foreign policy.”

Something else Florence Nightingale owed to, or shared with, her father. He, like some other members of his family, was of a reflective temperament, interested in speculative problems. There is a letter written by him to his wife from his father's sick-room (Sept. 1822) which shows the bent of his thoughts:—

I sit by his bedside and look at him as one would at a sleeping man, the idea of death only now and then flashing across my mind. I have been studying Mad. de Staël on the feeling of conviction, which exists more or less in different people and different nations, on the subject of soul as independent of external ideas. My imagination is a dull one, for it certainly required study with me to feel the full force of conviction that soul does and must exist quite separately from, though influenced by, external circumstances. You will say, I know, with a firm belief in Scripture and religion, Leave all philosophical speculation to the wild imaginations of the Germans. Nothing can change your reliance on religion. The perversity of my nature refers me to experience and analogies, though I begin to think that the study of the creation displayed before our faculties will exalt me into a conception of Divinity completely pervading the whole, but particularly that part of man which enables him to feel the difference between right and wrong independently of the ideas which he derives from external circumstances.

Florence Nightingale's mother accepted the religious standpoint of the day without question. Unitarianism was dropped by her and by her elder daughter; by Florence it was, as we shall hear, transcended. The mother's essential bent was practical, though the scope of it was somewhat limited. The mind of her daughter Florence found room in equal measure for practice and for contemplation. She inherited her mother's organising capacity, though she turned it to directions of her own. It was from her father that she inherited the taste for speculative inquiry which absorbed a large part of her life.

II

From the worldly circumstances of her parents Florence came to draw conclusions little sympathetic, in some respects, with existing usages and conventions. She accepted, indeed, the position of worldly wealth into which she was born without any fundamental questioning. In later years a young friend, on being urged to visit the villagers around one of Miss Nightingale's country homes, explained that she did not like the relation, she could not bring herself to go from a big comfortable house to instruct poor people how to live. Miss Nightingale laughed, and said, “You surely don't call Lea Hurst a big house.” It had only about fifteen bedrooms. She took for granted the position into which she was born. But she thought that wealth should only be used as a means of work. The easy, comfortable, not very strenuous conditions of her home life as a girl fixed the nature of her earlier years, but her soul did not become rooted in them. They sowed seeds which grew, as the years passed, not into acquiescence, but into revolt. Mr. Nightingale had inherited his great-uncle's property when nine years old. It accumulated for him, and a lead mine added greatly to its value. By the time of his marriage he was blessed (or, as his younger daughter came to think, afflicted) by the possession of a considerable fortune. Whether it were indeed a blessing or an affliction, it involved him in much uncertainty of mind. He and his wife returned from the Continent with their infant daughters in 1821, and the question became urgent, Where to live? The landed property which he inherited from his great-uncle was a comparatively small estate at and around Lea Hall in Derbyshire. To this property he added largely. The Hall, the old residence of his great-uncle, was discarded (it is now used as a farm-house), and Mr. Nightingale built a new house, called Lea Hurst. The charm of its situation and prospect is described in a letter by Mrs. Gaskell:—

“High as Lea Hurst is, one seems on a pinnacle, with the clouds careering round one. Down below is a garden with stone terraces and flights of steps—the planes of these terraces being perfectly gorgeous with masses of hollyhocks, dahlias, nasturtiums, geraniums, etc. Then a sloping meadow losing itself in a steep wooded descent (such tints over the wood!) to the river Derwent, the rocks on the other side of which form the first distance, and are of a red colour streaked with misty purple. Beyond this, interlacing hills, forming three ranges of distance; the first, deep brown with decaying heather; the next, in some purple shadow, and the last catching some pale, watery sunlight.” “I am left alone,” continued Mrs. Gaskell, “established high up, in two rooms, opening one out of the other—the old nurseries.” (The inner one, in which Mrs. Gaskell slept, was, when Parthenope grew up, her bedroom.) “It is curious how simple it is. The old carpet doesn't cover the floor. No easy chair, no sofa, a little curtainless bed, a small glass. In the outer room—the former day nursery—Miss Florence's room when she is at home, everything is equally simple; now, of course, the bed is reconverted into a sofa; two small tables, a few bookshelves, a drab carpet only partially covering the clean boards, and stone-coloured walls—as cold in colouring as need be, but with one low window on one side, trellised over with Virginian creeper as gorgeous as can be; and the opposite one, by which I am writing, looking over such country!”[6]

The sound of the Derwent was often in Florence's ears. When she was in the Hospital at Scutari any fretting in the Straits recalled it to her. “How I like,” she said on a stormy night, “to hear that ceaseless roar; it puts me in mind of the dear Derwent; how often I have listened to it from the nursery window.”

Lea Hurst became one of Florence Nightingale's earliest homes in England, but it was not the earliest of all. The house was not built when the family returned from the Continent, and Mr. Nightingale took Kynsham Court, Presteigne, in Herefordshire. The place, it seems, was “more picturesque than habitable,” and negotiations for the purchase of it, with a view to improvements, fell through. Mr. Nightingale liked Derbyshire, and was fond of his new house; but the rich, as well as the poor, have their perplexities. “The difficulty is,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife, “where is the county that is habitable for twelve successive months?” And, again, “How would you like Leicestershire? For my part, I think that, provided I could get about 2000 acres and a house in some neighbouring county where sporting and scenery were in tolerable abundance, and the visit to Lea Hurst were annually confined to July, August, September, and October, then all would be well.” While Mrs. Nightingale stayed at Kynsham, or took the children for change of air to the seaside or Tunbridge Wells, Mr. Nightingale divided his time between the management of his property in Derbyshire and the search for a second home elsewhere. Ultimately he found what he wanted at Embley Park in the parish of Wellow, near Romsey. This estate was bought in 1825, and Kynsham was given up. Embley is on the edge of the New Forest, and the rich growth of its woods and gardens is much favoured by sun and moisture. Old oaks and beeches, thickets of flowering laurel and rhododendron, and a profusion of flowers and scents, contrast with the bare breezy hills of Derbyshire. Its new owners had here the variety they wished for, and a full scope for their taste. The most praised of its beauties is a long road almost shut in by masses of rhododendron. One of the occasional pleasures of Miss Nightingale's later life in London was a drive in the Park, in rhododendron-time, “to remind her of Embley.”

III

From her fifth year onwards Florence Nightingale had, then, for her homes Lea Hurst in the summer months and Embley during the rest of the year. The family usually spent a portion of the season in London. The sisters led, it will thus be seen, a life mainly in the country, and Florence as a child became fond of flowers, birds, and beasts. A neatly printed manuscript-book is preserved, in which she made a catalogue of her collection of flowers, describing each with analytical accuracy, and noting the particular spot at which it was picked. Her childish letters contain many references to animal companions. She made particular friends with the nuthatch. She had a pet pig, a pet donkey, a pet pony. She was fond of riding, and fond of dogs. “A small pet animal,” she said many years afterwards, “is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.” “The more I see of men,” wrote a cynic, “the more I love dogs.” Florence Nightingale, in the same piece from which I have just quoted, drew a like moral from her experience of some nurses. “An invalid,” she said, “in giving an account of his nursing by a nurse and a dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘it did not talk.’”[7] There were no babies in the Nightingale family after the arrival of Florence herself, but most of her mother's many brothers and sisters married and had families; and as Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale's houses were often visited by these relations, there was seldom wanting a succession of babies, and in them and their christenings, and teethings, and illnesses, and lessons, Florence took that interest which is often strong in little girls.

Sometimes a baby died, and her letters show that Florence was as much interested in a death as in a birth. She rejoiced in “the little angels in heaven.” One of her favourite poems at this period was The Better Land of Mrs. Hemans, which she copied out for a cousin as “so very beautiful.” The earliest letter which I have seen, written when she was ten, strikes mingled notes. She is staying with Uncle Octavius Smith at “Thames Bank” (a house which then adjoined his distillery at Millbank), and writes to her sister, who is on a visit with the maid to another set of cousins:—

Give my love to Clémence, and tell her, if you please, that I am not in the room where she established me, but in a very small one; instead of the beautiful view of the Thames, a most dismal one of the black distillery, and, whenever I open my window, the nasty smell rushes in like a torrent. But I like it pretty well notwithstanding. There is a hole through the wall[11] close to my door, which communicates with the bath-room, which is next the room where Freddy[8] sleeps, and he talks to me by there. Tell her also, if you please, that I have washed myself all over and feet in warm water since I came every night. I went up into the distillery to the very tip-top by ladders with Uncle Oc and Fred Saturday night. We walked along a great pipe. We have had a good deal of boating which I like very much. We see three steam-boats pass every day, the Diana, the Fly, and the Endeavour. My love to all of them except Miss W——. Give my love particularly to Hilary. Your affect and only sister. Dear Pop, I think of you, pray let us love one another more than we have done. Mama wishes it particularly, it is the will of God, and it will comfort us in our trials through life. Good-bye.

Was Miss W—— an unsympathetic governess? Whoever she was, the exception in her disfavour shows an unregenerate impulse which contrasts naïvely with the following good resolve towards her sister. To a year earlier belongs a little note-book, entitled “Journal of Flo, Embley.” It begins with the reminder, “The Lord is with thee wherever thou art.” And then an entry records, “Sunday, I obliged to sit still by Miss Christie till I had the spirit of obedience.” As a child, and throughout all the earlier part of her life, Florence was much given to dreaming, and in some introspective speculations written in 1851 she recalled the pleasures of naughtiness. “When I was a child and was naughty, it always put an end to my dreaming for the time. I never could tell why. Was it because naughtiness was a more interesting state than the little motives which make man's peaceful civilized state, and occupied imagination for the time?” To Miss Christie, her first governess, Florence became greatly attached, and the death of the lady a few years later threw her into deep grief. She was a sensitive, and a somewhat morbid child; and though she presently developed a lively sense of humour, to which she had the capacity of giving trenchant expression, it was the humour of intellect rather than the outcome of a joyous disposition. Her early letters contain little note of childish fun. They are for the most part grave and introspective. She was self-absorbed, and had the shyness which attends upon that habit. “My greatest ambition,” she wrote in some private reminiscences of her early life, “was not to be remarked. I was always in mortal fear of doing something unlike other people, and I said, ‘If I were sure that nobody would remark me I should be quite happy.’ I had a morbid terror of not using my knives and forks like other people when I should come out. I was afraid of speaking to children because I was sure I should not please them.” Meanwhile, she was perhaps at times, even as a child, a little “difficult” at home. “Ask Flo,” wrote her father to his wife in 1832, “if she has lost her intellect. If not, why does she grumble at troubles which she cannot remedy by grumbling?”

IV

The appeal to his daughter's intellect was characteristic of Mr. Nightingale. He was himself a well-informed man, educated at Edinburgh, and Trinity, Cambridge; and, like some others of the Unitarian circle, he held views much in advance of the average opinion of his time about the intellectual education of women. The home education of his daughters was largely supervised by himself; it included a range of subjects far outside the curriculum current in “young ladies' seminaries”; and perhaps, like Hannah More's father, he was sometimes “frightened at his own success.” Letters and note-books show, it is true, that his daughters were duly instructed in the accomplishments deemed appropriate to young ladies. We hear of them learning the use of the globes, writing books of elegant extracts, working footstools, and doing fancy work. They studied music, grammar, composition, modern languages. “We used to read Tasso and Ariosto and Alfieri with my father,” Florence said; “he was a good and always interested Italian scholar, never pedantic, never a tiresome grammarian, but he spoke Italian like an Italian and I took care of the verbs.” Mr. Nightingale added constitutional history, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. By the time Florence was sixteen, he was reading Homer with his daughters. Miss Nightingale used to say that at Greek her sister was the quicker scholar. Their father set them appointed tasks to prepare. Parthenope would trust largely to improvisation or lucky shots. Florence was more laborious; and sometimes would get up at four in the morning to prepare the lesson. Her knowledge of Latin was of some practical use in later years. In conversations with abbots and monks whom she met during her travels she sometimes found in Latin their only common tongue. Among Florence's papers were preserved many sheets in her father's handwriting, containing the heads of admirable outlines of the political history of England and of some foreign states. Her own note-books show that in her teens she had mastered the elements of Latin and Greek. She analysed the Tusculan Disputations. She translated portions of the Phaedo, the Crito and the Apology. She had studied Roman, German, Italian, and Turkish history. She had analysed Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Human Mind. Her father was in the habit, too, of suggesting themes on which his daughters were to write compositions. It was the system of the College Essay. “Florence has now taken to mathematics,” wrote her sister in 1840, “and, like everything she undertakes, she is deep in them and working very hard.” The direction in which Florence Nightingale was to exercise the faculties thus trained was as yet hidden in the future; but to her father's guidance she was indebted for the mental grasp and power of intellectual concentration which were to distinguish her work in life.

It is a natural temptation of biographers to give a formal unity to their subject by representing the child as in all things the father of the man; to date the vocation of their hero or heroine very early in life; to magnify some childish incident as prophetic of what is to come thereafter. Material is available for such treatment in the case of Florence Nightingale. It has been recorded that she used to nurse and bandage the dolls which her elder sister damaged. Every book about the heroine of the Crimea contains, too, a tale of “first aid to the wounded” which Florence administered to Cap, the shepherd's collie, whom she found with a broken leg on the downs near Embley. “I wonder,” wrote her “old Pastor”[9] to her in 1858, “whether you remember how, twenty-two years ago, you and I together averted the intended hanging of poor old Shepherd Smithers's dog, Cap. How many times I have told the story since! I well recollect the pleasure which the saving of the life of a poor dog then gave to your young mind. I was delighted to witness it; it was to me not indeed an omen of what you were about to do and be (for of that I never dreamed), but it was an index of that kind and benevolent disposition, of that I Cor. xiii. Charity, which has been at the root of it.” And it is certainly interesting and curious, if nothing more, that the very earliest piece in the handwriting of Florence Nightingale which has been preserved should be a medical prescription. It is contained in a tiny book, about the size of a postage-stamp, which the little girl stitched together and in which the instruction is written, in very childish letters, “16 grains for an old woman, 11 for a young woman, and 7 for a child.” But these things are after all but trifles. Florence Nightingale is not the only little girl who has been fond of nursing sick dolls or mending them when broken. Other children have tended wounded animals and had their pill-boxes and simples. Much, too, has been written about Florence's kindness as a child to her poorer neighbours. Her mother, both at Lea Hurst and at Embley, sometimes occupied herself in good works. She and her husband were particularly interested in a “cheap school” which they supported at their Derbyshire home. “Large sums of money have been paid,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife in 1832, “to your schoolmistress for many praiseworthy purposes, who works con amore in looking after the whole population, young and old.” Florence took her place, beside her mother, in visiting poor neighbours, in arranging school-treats, in giving village entertainments. But thousands of other squires' daughters, before and after her, have done the like. And Florence herself, as many entries in her diaries show, was not conscious of doing much, but reproachful of herself for doing little. The constant burden of her self-examination, both at this time and for many years to come, was that she was for ever “dreaming” and never “doing.” She was dreaming because for a long time she did not clearly feel or see what her work in life was to be; and then for yet another period of time because, when she knew what she was called to do, she could not compass the means to do it. Her faculties were not brought outwards, but were left, by the conditions of her life, to devour themselves inwardly.

The discovery of her true vocation belongs, then, to a later period of our story; and it was not the result of childish fancy, or the accomplishment of early incident; it was the fruit of long and earnest study. What did come to Florence Nightingale early in life—perhaps, as one entry in her autobiographical notes suggests, as early as her sixth year—was the sense of a “call”; of some appointed mission in life; of self-dedication to the service of God. “I remember her,” wrote Fanny Allen in 1857 to her niece Elizabeth Wedgwood, “as a little girl of three or four, then the girl of sixteen of high promise. When I look back on every time I saw her after her sixteenth year, I see that she was ripening constantly for her work, and that her mind was dwelling on the painful differences of man and man in this life, and on the traps that a luxurious life laid for the affluent. A conversation on this subject between the father and daughter made me laugh at the time, the contrast was so striking; but now, as I remember it, it was the Divine Spirit breathing in her.”[10] In an autobiographical fragment written in 1867 Florence mentions as one of the crises of her inner life that “God called her to His service” on February 7, 1837, at Embley; and there are later notes which still fix that day as the dawn of her true life. But as yet she knew not whither the Spirit was to lead. For three months, indeed, as she notes in another passage of retrospect, she “worked very hard among the poor people” under “a strong feeling of religion.”

V

Presently, however, a new direction was given to her thoughts and interests. She was now seventeen, her sister eighteen. Their home education had been far advanced, and might seem to require only such “finishing” as masters and society in France and Italy could supply. Mr. Nightingale had, moreover, decided to carry out extensive alterations at Embley. With his wife and daughters, he crossed from Southampton to Havre on September 8, 1837, and they did not return to England till April 6, 1839. Those were days of leisurely travel, such as Ruskin describes, in which “distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent.” There were many such hours during the journeys which the Nightingales took with a vetturino through France and Italy; and Florence, writing at a later date, when all her life was fixed on doing, noted that on this tour there was “too much time for dreaming.” Yet it is clear from her diaries that she entered heartily, and with a wider range of interest than some English travellers show, into the life of foreign society and sight-seeing. A love of statistical method which became one of her most marked characteristics may already be seen in an itinerary which she compiled; noting, in its several columns, the number of leagues from place to place, with the day and the hour both of arrival and of departure. They went leisurely through France, visiting, besides many other places, Chartres, Blois, Tours, Nantes, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Carcassonne, Nîmes, Avignon, and Toulon, and then going by the Riviera to Nice. There they stayed for nearly a month (Dec. 1837–Jan. 1838). A month was next spent at Genoa, and two months were given to Florence. The late spring and summer were devoted to travel in the cities of Northern Italy, among the lakes, and in Switzerland. They spent the month of September in Geneva, and reached Paris on October 8, 1838. Miss Nightingale preserved her diary of the greater part of the tour, and it shows her keenly interested alike in scenery and in works of art. It contains also, what records of sentimental pilgrimages often lack, an admixture of notes and statistics upon the laws, the land systems, the social conditions and benevolent institutions of the several states or cantons. Her interest in the politics of the day was keen wherever she was; and the society of many refugees into which she was thrown at Geneva gave her a particularly ardent sympathy with the cause of Italian freedom. The diary contains many biographical notes upon Italian patriots, whose adventures she heard related by their own lips. “A stirring day,” she wrote on September 12 (1838), “the most stirring which we have ever lived.” It was the day on which the news reached Geneva that the Emperor of Austria had declared an amnesty in Italy. The Nightingales attended an evening party at which the Italian refugees assembled and the Imperial decree was read out amidst loud jubilation; which, however, was afterwards abated when it turned out that the “general amnesty” contained many conditions and some exceptions. The Nightingales had the entrée to all the learned society of Geneva. Florence records an evening spent with M. de Candolle, the famous botanist; and the diary gives many glimpses of Sismondi, the historian, who was then living in his native city. He escorted the Nightingale party up the Salève. They made that not very formidable ascent first on donkeys and then “in a sledge covered with straw and drawn by four oxen.” Florence was present on another occasion when “all the company gathered round Sismondi who, sitting on a table, gave us a lecture on Florentine history.” The conscientious Florence made a full note in her diary of the great man's discourse. “All Sismondi's political economy,” she also noted, “seems to be founded on the overflowing kindness of his heart. He gives to old beggars on principle, to young from habit. At Pescia he had 300 beggars at his door on one morning. He feeds the mice in his room while he is writing his histories.” Presently there was a new excitement in Geneva. “What a stirring time we live in,” Florence wrote on September 18; “one day to decide the fate of the Italians, to-morrow to decide the fate of Switzerland.” “To-morrow” was the day fixed for the meeting of the Conseil Représentatif which was to take into consideration the demand of Louis Philippe for the expulsion of Louis Napoleon, the future Emperor. Many pages of Miss Nightingale's diary are given up to this affair. She analysed all the pros and cons, and recorded day by day the course of the debate. Sismondi thought that the refugee ought to be surrendered—on principle because he was a pretender, in expediency because Geneva would be unable to withstand a French assault. He “spoke for an hour” in this sense. The Genevois radicals, on the other hand, while entertaining no great love for the pretender, thought that, cost what it might, “the sacred right of asylum” should be maintained. And so the debate continued. The French Government began to move troops from Lyons; the Genevois, to throw up fortifications. Whereupon Mr. Nightingale, like many other English visitors, thought it time to take his family across the frontier. Miss Nightingale's diary written en route to Paris shows her excitement to obtain news of the crisis. When she learnt that it had been solved by Louis Napoleon being given a passport for England, she did not see that Louis Philippe had gained very much; the pretender would be nearer, and not less dangerous, in London than in Geneva—a very just prediction. Not every girl of eighteen, when taking her first tour abroad, shows so lively an interest in political affairs.

Politics and social observations mingle in the diary with artistic and architectural notes. The city which seems most to have appealed to her imagination was not Florence; though she said that she “would not have missed it for anything,” and, curiously, her sojourn in her birthplace was the occasion of a characteristic incident. An English lady, who afterwards became Princess Reuss Köstritz, was staying in the same lodgings and fell ill, and Florence Nightingale volunteered to nurse her. But the city which she most admired was Genoa La Superba. She notes indeed the excessive indolence of the nobles and excessive poverty of the people, but the palaces “realized an Arabian Nights story” for her. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale had many friends and brought many introductions. In the various towns where they stayed they mixed in the best society, and their daughters were thrown into a lively round of picnics, concerts, soirées, dancing:

There were Court balls at which Grand Dukes were “exceedingly polite” to Florence Nightingale and her sister. They went to an evening Court at Florence, and found “everyone most courteous and agreeable.” There was a ball at the Casino in Genoa, at which, writes Florence in her diary, “my partner and I made an embrouillement, and a military officer came up with a very angry face to challenge me for having refused him and then not dancing.” But the music was not all to the tune of “A Toccata of Galuppi's.” What gave Florence the greatest pleasure on this tour was the Italian opera. In those days the reigning singers were Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and Tamburini. Florence Nightingale heard them all. Her Italian diary is nowhere so elaborate as in descriptions of the operas and in notes on the performers. She kept a separate book in which she wrote tabulated details of all the performances. “I should like to go every night,” she said in her diary; and for some time after her return from the Continent she was, as she wrote to Miss Clarke, “music-mad.” She took music-lessons at Florence, and in London studied under German and Italian masters. She played and sang. It was as yet uncertain whether “the call”—to what, as yet also unknown—might not be drowned in the tastes, interests, and pursuits which fill the life of other young ladies in her position.

VI

The fascination of social life must have been brought vividly before her during the winter (1838–39) which they spent in Paris, in apartments in the Place Vendôme (No. 22). She was now introduced into the brilliant circle of the last of the salons. Mary Clarke, afterwards Madame Mohl, was by descent half Irish, half Scottish; by education and residence, almost wholly French. “A charming mixture,” said Ampère of her, “of French vivacity and English originality.” Full at once of esprit and of espièglerie, well read and artistic yet wholly devoid of pedantry, without regular beauty of feature, but alert and piquante, Mary Clarke had gathered round her what Ticknor in 1837 had found the most intellectual circle in Paris. For seven years she and her mother lived in apartments in the Abbaye-au-Bois, adjoining those of Madame Récamier, and Mary was a daily visitor to the famous salon during the reign of Chateaubriand, whose closing years she did much to brighten and amuse. At the time when the Nightingales arrived in Paris, Mrs. and Miss Clarke had left the Abbaye-au-Bois and established themselves in those apartments in the Rue du Bac which for nearly forty years were a haunt of all that was brilliant in the intellectual life of Paris. Mary Clarke took most affectionately to the Nightingale family, who, with some of their connections, remained for long years among her closest friends. She used to pay a yearly visit to Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale, either at Embley or at Lea Hurst, generally staying three weeks or a month; and to her many of Florence's most interesting letters were, as we shall find, addressed. To her other and more superficial qualities, Mary Clarke added great warmth of lasting affection for her intimate friends, and her sympathetic kindness to the Nightingale circle was unfailing. The attraction of Paris to Florence lay principally in its hospitals and nursing sisterhoods, but partly also in that it was the home of “Clarkey,” as they called her. And it was the same with other members of the family. There is a letter from Lady Verney to Clarkey which describes how some one asked Mr. Nightingale, “Are you going to Paris?” “Oh, no,” he replied; “Madame Mohl is ill.” “Then does Paris mean Madame Mohl?” “Yes, certainly,” he replied gravely. During the winter of 1838–39 Miss Clarke, writes Lady Verney, was “exceedingly kind to Florence and me, two young girls full of all kinds of interests, which she took the greatest pains to help. She made us acquainted with all her friends, many and notable, among them Madame Récamier. I know now, better than then, what her influence must have been thus to introduce an English family (two of them girls who, if French, would not have appeared in society) into that jealously guarded sanctuary, the most exclusive aristocratic and literary salon in Paris. We were asked, even, to the reading by Chateaubriand, at the Abbaye-au-Bois, of his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, which he could not wait to put forth, as he had intended when writing them, until after his death—desiring, it was said, to discount the praises which he expected, but hardly received. This hearing was a favour eagerly sought for by the cream of the cream of Paris society at that time.”[11] In Miss Clarke's own apartments, the Nightingales met many distinguished men. The intimates who were always there, and who assisted their hostess in making the tea, were MM. Fauriel and Mohl—Claude Fauriel, versed in mediæval and Provençal lore, a man exceedingly handsome, who had captivated Madame de Staël and other ladies besides Mary Clarke in his friendships; and Julius Mohl, one of the first Orientalists in Europe, a more ardent lover whom, after a probation of eighteen years, Miss Clarke married in 1847. M. Mohl was once asked by Queen Victoria why, loving Germany so much, he had given up his native country for France. “Ma foi, madame,” he replied, “j'ètais amoureux.” With M. Mohl, no less than with his wife, Florence Nightingale was on terms of affectionate friendship. Among the frequent visitors whom she and her sister met at Miss Clarke's were Madame Tastu (the poetess), Élie de Beaumont (the geologist), Roulin (the traveller and naturalist), Cousin, Mignet, Guizot, Tocqueville, Barthélemy St. Hilaire, and Thiers. The last-named was one of Miss Clarke's earliest admirers; and many years later, after the Franco-German war, when Thiers was at the head of affairs, Lady Verney heard M. Mohl say to his wife, “Madame, why did you not marry M. Thiers instead of me, for now you would have been Queen of France?”

In such circles as that which gathered around Miss Clarke, Florence Nightingale was well qualified to hold her own and even to play a brilliant part. Her life of gaiety on the Riviera and in Italy must have rubbed away much of the shyness from which she had suffered. If not beautiful, she was elegant and distinguished. She was both widely and deeply read. She had many and varied interests. She had powers of expression, in which clearness was not unmixed with a note of humorous subacidity. These are social advantages, and she was not without the inclination to use them. She chose in the end another path—a path which was beset by many obstacles of circumstance; but there were obstacles in herself also, and one of the last “temptations” to be overcome, before she was free to interpret her call and to act upon it, was (as she wrote in many a page of confession and self-examination) “the desire to shine in society.”

CHAPTER II
HOME LIFE
(1839–1845)

Her passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.—George Eliot: Middlemarch.

The home life to which Florence Nightingale returned in April 1839 was rich in possibilities of social pleasure, and might have seemed to promise every happiness. She was well fitted by nature and by education to be an ornament of any country house; to shine in any cultivated society; to become the wife, as many of her best friends hoped and believed, of some good and clever man. But Florence, as she passed from childhood to womanhood, came to form other plans. Her life, as she ultimately shaped it, her example, which circumstances were destined to render far-shining, have been potent factors in opening new avenues for women in the modern world. Thousands of women in these days are, in consequence of Florence Nightingale's career, born free; but it was at a great price, and after long and weary struggles, that she herself attained such freedom. During the years with which, in this Part, we shall be concerned, she lived in some sort the life of a caged bird.

The cage, however, was pleasantly gilded. Florence was not always insensible of the gilding; there were times when she was tempted to chafe no longer at its bars, and to accept a restricted life within the conventional lines. I do not propose to detail, as might be done from her letters, diaries, and other materials, the precise succession of her goings and comings, her visits, and her home pursuits. She herself gives an excellent reason in one of her diaries. “Our movements are so regular,” she said; one year was very like another. The setting of Florence Nightingale's life during this period was such as many women have enjoyed, and many others have envied. The lines of the Nightingale family were laid in pleasant places. Their summer months were spent, as in preceding years, at Lea Hurst. A portion of the season was spent in London, and the rest of the year at Embley. On their return from the Continent in 1839, the Nightingales spent some weeks in London, when the two girls were presented at Court, and a letter to Miss Clarke shows Florence absorbed in music, but not so completely as to conquer a lively interest in the politics of the Bedchamber Plot:—

Carlton Hotel, Regent Street, June 1 [1839].… We are enjoying ourselves much, for the Nicholsons, our cousins, came up to town the day after we did, and are living in the same hotel with us in Regent Street, the best situation in London, I think, but some people call it too noisy. As Marianne Nicholson is as music-mad as I am, we are revelling in music all day long. Schulz, who is a splendid player, and Crivelli, her singing master, give us lessons, and the unfortunate piano has been strummed out of tune in a week, not having even its natural rest at nights, as there are other masters as well. We went to Pauline Garcia's début at the opera in Otello. She was exceedingly nervous and trembled all over, but her great improvement towards the end promised well. Her lower notes are very fine indeed, and two shakes she made low down, though too much like instrumental to be agreeable, were very extraordinary. Her voice, however, is excessively unequal, and sometimes her singing is quite commonplace. She makes too much of her execution, which is very uneven. It is very easy to say that she will be another Malibran, but if they were side by side the difference would be seen; so say wiser judges than we. Even Grisi is quite superior to her in Desdemona, although P. Garcia's voice is the most powerful, but then P. Garcia was excessively frightened. We have heard her sing a duet with Persiani in which both were perfect, and I heard Dohler for the[25] first time at the same concert. I was nowise disappointed, although I had heard so much of him at Paris, his execution is extraordinary, but I think one would soon grow tired of it, for both his music and his style are very inferior to Thalberg's. Have you heard Batta on the violoncello at Paris? His playing approaches more nearly to the human voice than anything I ever heard. We are going to hear charming Persiani to-night in the Lucia di Lammermoor. Tamburini, the most good-natured of mortals, has volunteered to come and sing two or three hours with my cousin Marianne every season, whenever she thinks herself sufficiently advanced. We are going to hear him at a private concert on Monday.

Now there has been enough and too much of musical news, but political news is scarce.… London was in a perfect whirlwind of excitement for the few days that the Melbourne ministry was out, but that is stale already. Our little Queen, who was sadly unpopular when we first came to England, recovered much of her former favour with the Whig party after the firmness she showed in this affair. She was cheered and called forward at the opera, which had not been done for months, and again returning from chapel. And the birthday drawing-room was overflowing, whereas at the two first she gave this season, there were hardly forty people! The story of this last fracas is that on Tuesday, the day of Lord Melbourne's resignation, the Queen dined upstairs with her mother, Baroness Lehzen, and Lady F. Hastings, which she had never done since her accession, and it is supposed that the amende honorable was then made to Lady Flora, and that in this partie carrée was also arranged the course which was to be pursued with Sir Robert Peel. The poor little Queen was seen in tears by several people who told us in the course of the three days, and struggled for her Ladies, as you see, manfully. However matters may turn out now, it is said that she has taken so tremendous a dislike to Sir R. Peel in this affair, that she will never send for him again.

Since that, the House has been adjourned for a fortnight and only met last Monday when the Speaker was elected, Abercromby going up to the House of Peers. We are rejoicing in the election of Shaw Lefevre, by a majority of eighteen; rather less than was expected, however, Spring Rice arriving half an hour too late to vote, which has made rather a commotion. Shaw Lefevre is a great friend of ours, and a very agreeable man, which is his chief qualification for the chair. Macaulay is not likely to come into the Ministry; Lord Melbourne says that it is impossible to get on with a man who talks so fast. So he is now writing history, and saying that it is the only thing worth doing, except, however, standing for Edinburgh in Abercromby's room[26] against Crawford. Macaulay has made an admirable speech in favour of ballot there.

The Queen is vibrating between popularity and unpopularity, and it is not yet known which way the scale will turn between the two parties; she was very much applauded, and Lord Melbourne too, at Ascot yesterday. He is likely to keep the upper hand, as the Tories have not such a man as Lord John Russell in all their party, and the nine obstreperous Radicals have had a sop and give in their adhesion for the present. Papa is shocked to hear that M. Guizot has declared himself so anti-English.…

We always talk of you and all that you did for us at Paris. I heard yesterday that Gonfalonieri was coming to London in a month. Is he at Paris now? I have just been reading the account of M. Mignet's éloge of Talleyrand. I hope you were there, for it must have been very interesting, but did not he make rather an extraordinary defence of Talleyrand's political tergiversation, and of his conduct while the Allies were at Paris? extraordinary to our ideas of political integrity. We met “ubiquity” Young and Mr. Babbage yesterday at dinner at the E. Strutts', who told all sorts of droll stories about Lord Brougham, who seems to have fairly lost his wits. He had Lord Duncannon to dine with him the other day, which is new, he having formerly stipulated when he went out to dinner that he should see none of his former colleagues. He sends his carriage to stand before Lord Denman's house for hours while he goes and walks in the Park, or even while he is out of town, to give the idea that they are very intimate.…

In another letter to Miss Clarke (Sept. 18), some further gossip is given. Miss Nightingale was on her way back to London from Lea Hurst, and had broken the journey at Nottingham:—

The next day we went up to town by rail in six and a half hours, notwithstanding that the engine was twice out of order and stopped us. We had very agreeable company on the road, a neighbour of ours and equerry to the Queen,[12] who was full of her virtues and condescensions. How much pleasanter it is travelling by these public conveyances than in one's own stupid carriage. He said that Lord Melbourne called the Queen's favourite terrier a frightful little beast, and often contradicted her flat, all which she takes in good part, and lets him go to sleep after dinner,[27] taking care that he shall not be waked.[13] She reads all the newspapers and all the vilifying abuse which the Tories give her, and makes up her mind that a queen must be abused, and hates them cordially.

II

The Nightingales had taken up their residence at Embley in September 1839, and remained there, in accordance with their wont, till the early summer following. The charm of the place is vividly described in a letter from Florence's sister to her cousin, Miss Hilary Bonham Carter:—

My Love—It is so beautiful in this world! so very beautiful, you really cannot fancy anything so near approaching to Eden or fairy-land, or il paradiso terrestre as depicted in the 25th Canto, stanza 40 something; so very, very lovely that we cannot resist a very strong desire that you should come down and see it. My dear, I assure you we are worth seeing. I never, though blest with many fair visions (both in my sleeping and my waking hours), conceived anything so exquisite as to-day lying among the flowers, such smells and such sounds hovering round me! Flo reading and talking so that my immortal profited too, and she comforted me when I said I must have much of the beast in me to be so very happy in the sunshine and the flowers, by suggesting that God gave us His blessings to enjoy them. So I am comforted, and set to work to enjoy with all my might, and succeed à merveille. Still the garden is big, there are many clumps of rhododendrons and azaleas, and showers of rosebuds, and I cannot be all round them at once; so we want you to come and help, not so much for your pleasure as to relieve the weight of responsibility, you see.… My love, I am writing perched on a chair on the grass, nightingales all round, blue sky above (such long shadows sleeping on the lawn), and June smells about me. Will you not come? The rhododendrons are early this year, and will be much passed in another ten days. Will you not come? If you ask learned men they will tell you June at Embley is a poetry ready made; and the first thing I shall do when I get to heaven (you'd better set about getting there Miss Pop directly, you're a very long way off at these[28] presents), where I expect to have the gift of language, is to celebrate the pomps and beauties of the garden in this wicked world, than which I never wish for a better.

Florence and her sister loved each other, but their characters were widely different, as we shall hear, and their love at this time was not that of perfect sympathy, but rather of wistful admiration on the one side, and half-pitying fondness on the other. Parthenope looked upon Florence as upon some strange being in another world, whose happiness she passionately longed to see, and whose rejection of it she could but dimly understand. Florence, on her side, regarded her elder sister's contentment in the beauties of art and nature, and in the world as she found it, with the tender pity which one may feel for a happy child. “It would be an ill return for all her affection,” wrote Florence to one of her aunts, “to drag down my White Swan from her cool, fresh, blue sea of art into our baby chicken-yard of struggling, scratting[14] life. How cruel it would be, as she is rocked to rest there on her dreamy waves, for anybody to waken her.” The difference in temperament between the sisters comes out very clearly in their several descriptions of Embley. Florence was sensible of its beauties, but they came to her with thoughts of a better world beyond, or with echoes from the still sad music of humanity in the world that now is. “I should have so liked you to see Embley in the summer,” she wrote,[15] “for everything is such a blaze of beauty. I had such a lovely walk yesterday before breakfast. The voice of the birds is like the angels calling me with their songs, and the fleecy clouds look like the white walls of our Home. Nothing makes my heart thrill like the voice of the birds; but the living chorus so seldom finds a second voice in the starved and earthly soul, which, like the withered arm, cannot stretch forth its hand till Christ bids it.” A very different note, it will be observed, from that which Parthenope—and Pippa—heard from “the lark on the wing.” And so, too, with regard to the house at Embley. Mr. Nightingale had found it a plain, substantial building of the Georgian period. He enlarged it into an ornate mansion in the Elizabethan style. His wife and elder daughter were much occupied with the interest of furnishing it appropriately, and Mr. Nightingale was greatly pleased with his alterations. “Do you know,” said Florence, as she walked with an American friend on the lawn in front of the drawing-room, “what I always think when I look at that row of windows? I think how I should turn it into a hospital, and just how I should place the beds.”[16]

III

Embley was now a large house, with accommodation enough to receive at one time, as Florence recorded in a letter, “five able-bodied married females, with their husbands and belongings.” The large number of Mr. Nightingale's brothers and sisters, some of whom had many sons and daughters, made the family circle of the Nightingales a very wide one. Between four of the families the intercourse was particularly close—the Nightingales, the Nicholsons, the Bonham Carters, and the Samuel Smiths. One of Mrs. Nightingale's sisters married Mr. George Thomas Nicholson, of Waverley Abbey, near Farnham, Surrey.[17] Among their children, Marianne was as a girl a great friend of her cousin Florence. In 1851 Miss Nicholson married Captain (afterwards Sir) Douglas Galton, who, some few years later, became closely and helpfully connected with Miss Nightingale's work. To Mr. Nicholson's sister, “Aunt Hannah,” Florence was greatly attached. Another of Mrs. Nightingale's sisters married Mr. John Bonham Carter, of Ditcham, near Petersfield, for many years M.P. for Portsmouth. His eldest daughter, Joanna Hilary, was a particular friend of Florence Nightingale, who said that of all her contemporaries within her circle, her cousin Hilary was the most gifted. One of the sons, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, was, and is, Secretary of the Nightingale Fund, and Miss Nightingale appointed him one of her executors. Between the Nightingales and the Samuel Smiths the relationship was double. Mrs. Nightingale's brother, Mr. Samuel Smith, of Combe Hurst, Surrey, married Mary Shore, sister of Mr. Nightingale; moreover, their son, Mr. William Shore Smith, was the heir (after his mother) to the entailed land at Embley and Lea Hurst, in default of a son to Mr. Nightingale. The eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Smith, Blanche, married Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet, who, as we shall hear, was closely associated with Miss Nightingale. There were many other relations; but without being troubled to go into further details, which might tax severely even the authoress of the Pillars of the House, the reader will perceive that Florence Nightingale was well provided with uncles, aunts, and cousins.

The fact is of some significance in understanding the circumstances of her life at this time, and the nature of her struggle for independence. Emancipated or revolting daughters are sometimes pardoned or condoned if they can aver that they have few home ties. To Mrs. Nightingale it may have seemed that in the domestic intercourse within so large a family circle, any comfortable daughter might find abundance of outlet and interest. And so, in one respect at least, her daughter Florence did. The maternal instinct in her, for which she was not in her own person to find fruition, went out in almost passionate fulness to the young cousin, William Shore Smith, mentioned above. He was “her boy,” she used to say, from the day on which he was put as a baby into her arms when she was eleven years old. Up to the time of his going up to Cambridge, he spent a portion of his holidays in every year at Lea Hurst or Embley. Florence's letters at such times were full of him. She was successively his nurse, playfellow, and tutor. “The son of my heart,” she called him; “while he is with me all that is mine is his, my head and hands and time.”

It generally happens in any large family circle that there is one woman to whom all its members instinctively turn when trouble comes or help is needed. Florence was the one in the Nightingale circle who filled this rôle of Sister of Mercy or Emergency Man—taking charge of one household when an aunt was away, or being dispatched to another when illness was prevalent. In 1845 she spent some time with her father's mother, who was threatened with paralysis, and whom she nursed into partial recovery. “I am very glad sometimes,” she wrote from her grandmother's sick-room to her cousin Hilary, “to walk in the valley of the shadow of death as I do here; there is something in the stillness and silence of it which levels all earthly troubles. God tempers our wings in the waters of that valley, and I have not been so happy or so thankful for a long time. And yet it is curious, in the last years of life, that we should go down-hill in order to climb up the other side; that in the struggle of the spiritual with the material part of the universe, the material should get the better, and the soul, just at the moment of becoming spiritualised for ever, should seem to become more materialised.” She made a similar reflection a little later in the same year (1845), when tending her old nurse, Gale, in her last illness. “The old lady's spirit,” she wrote, “was in her pillow-cases, and one night when she thought she was dying, and I was sitting up with her, she said, ‘Now, Miss Florence, mind you have two new cases made for this bed, for I think whoever sleeps here next year will find them comfortable.’” The death-bed of the nurse of the Queen of Nurses deserves some note. The last words of Mrs. Gale, as reported in other letters, were, “Don't wake the cook,” “Hannah, go to your work,” and “Miss Florence, be careful in going down those stairs.” If the spirit of this old servant was materialised at the moment of passing, the materialising took the form at any rate of faithful service and of consideration for others.

Florence's sympathy with those in distress is shown in the letter of condolence which she wrote to Miss Clarke upon the death of M. Fauriel:—

Embley, July 1844. I cannot help writing one word, my dear Miss Clarke, after having just received your note, though I know I cannot say anything which can be of any comfort. For there are few sorrows I do believe like your sorrow, and few[32] people so necessary to another's happiness of every instant, as he was to yours.… How sorry I am, dear Miss Clarke, that you will not think of coming to us here. Oh, do not say that you “will not cloud young people's spirits.” Do you think young people are so afraid of sorrow, or that if they have lively spirits, which I often doubt, they think these are worth anything, except in so far as they can be put at the service of sorrow, not to relieve it, which I believe can very seldom be done, but to sympathise with it? I am sure this is the only thing worth living for, and I do so believe that every tear one sheds waters some good thing into life.… Dear Miss Clarke, I wish we had you here, or at least could see you and pour out something of what our hearts are full of. That clever man of Thebes, one Cadmus, need never have existed, for any good that that cold pen and ink of his ever did, in the way of expressing oneself. The iron pen seems to make the words iron, but words are what always takes the dust off the butterfly's wings.… What nights we have had this last month, though when one thinks that there are hundreds and thousands of people suffering in the same way, and when one sees in every cottage some trouble which defies sympathy—and there is all the world putting on its shoes and stockings every morning all the same—and the wandering earth going its inexorable tread-mill through those cold-hearted stars in the eternal silence, as if nothing were the matter;—death seems less dreary than life at that rate. But I did not mean to say that, for who would know the peace of night, if it were not for the troubles of the day, “the welcome, the thrice-prayed-for, the most fair, the best beloved night,” when one feels, what at other times one only repeats to oneself, that the coffin of every hope is the cradle of a good experience, and that nobody suffers in vain. It is odd what want of faith one has for one's friends. We know what soft lots we would have made for them if we could; and that we should believe ourselves so infinitely more good-natured than God, that we cannot trust their lots with Him!

It must not be supposed, however, that Florence was in request among the family circle only at times of sad emergency. She sometimes took her place no less effectually on festive occasions. Waverley Abbey, the house of Uncle Nicholson aforesaid, was the scene of family reunions at Christmas-time; and in letters to Miss Clarke from both Mrs. Nightingale and her daughter Parthe, there is a lively account of private theatricals there in 1841. The Merchant of Venice was chosen, and Macready volunteered some assistance. Parthe's artistic gifts were requisitioned, and she was “scene-painter, milliner, and cap-and-fur maker.” The powers of command and organization, which Florence was afterwards to exhibit in another field, seem to have been divined by her cousins, for she was unanimously appointed stage-manager. Miss Joanna Horner, who was one of the party, remembers that the usual little jealousies about parts and costumes used to disappear in presence of Florence. “Flo very blooming,” reported Mrs. Nightingale. “The actors were not very obstinate, and were tolerably good-tempered,” wrote Parthe, “but it was hard work for Flo. There was a Captain Elliot, fresh from China, who could by no means be brought to obey. He was Antonio, and would burst out laughing in the midst of his most pathetic bits, to the horror of Shylock, who was very earnest and hard-working.” The Lady-in-Chief in later years in the Crimea had a rather peremptory way with obstructive military gentlemen. On this occasion, however, she was perhaps satisfied with the assurance given at a well-known pantomime rehearsal, that it would “be all right on the night.” But it was not. “Your flame, Uncle Adams,”[18] continues the letter to Miss Clarke, “was very fine in Lancelot! but, oh, desperation, forgot his Duke's part in the most flagrant way, tho' Flo had been putting it into him with a sledge-hammer all the week.” In the intervals of rehearsing, the girls and their cousins danced and sang, and took large walks, sixteen together. After the performance, dancing was kept up till five in the morning. “Next day,” continues Lady Verney, “we were debating whether ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ went on with a bag or a pocket full of rye; and warming on this interesting subject, we young ones dragged in all the old people, sought recruits high and low, and had a regular election scene. Uncle Adams made a hustings speech, giving both parties hopes of his vote; then the boys slunk out after the counting, and came in with large outcries to be counted a second time, with many other corrupt practices much used at such times; then we bribed a little boy to go and make disturbances in the other faction; but you will be happy to hear the pockets had it by a large majority, and we beat the base baggites out of the field. After the holloaing was over, and the alarming rushings and screamings we had made, M. Kroff (a Bohemian), who had listened and assisted, came to Mama, and said, ‘This do give me the great idea of the liberty of your land, your young people are brought up so to understand it in your domestic life; if we were to make such a noise we should have the police in with swords and cutlasses to divide us!’”

IV

The Nightingales had as many friends without as within the family circle. Their two homes brought them in touch with county society alike in Derbyshire and in Hampshire, and acquaintanceships made in London were often ripened in the country, or vice versa. In Derbyshire their friends included the Strutts, and Richard Monckton Milnes, who afterwards took a cordial interest in the Nightingale Fund. In London, Florence and her sister went out a great deal, and saw all that was interesting to well-educated young persons. A letter from Florence to one of her aunts shows her occupied in politics, in literature, in astronomy, with something, perhaps, of the note of a blue; yet with her mind already set on a purpose in life:—

(Miss F. Nightingale to Miss Julia Smith.) June 20 [1843]. A cold east wind, forty-one days of rain in the last month! as our newspaper informs us to prove that '43 is worse than any preceding year. Du reste, the world very pleasant—people looking up in the prospect of Peel's giving them free trade and all radical measures in the course of one or two years. Carlyle's new Past and Present, a beautiful book. There are bits about “Work,” which how I should like to read with you! “Blessed is he who has found his work: let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose: he has found it and will follow it.…” Sir J. Graham is going to be obliged to give up his Factories Education Bill for this year; O ye bigoted Dissenters! but I am going to hold my tongue and not “meddle with politics” or “talk about things which I don't understand,” for I tremble already in anticipation, and proceed at once to facts.… The two things we have done in London this year—the most striking things—are seeing Bouffé[35] in Clermont, the blind painter (you have seen him, so I need not descant on his entire difference from anybody else); and going under Mr. Bethune to Sir James South's at Kensington,[19] where we were from ten o'clock till three the next morning. Mr. Bethune is certainly the most good-natured man in ancient or modern history. You will fancy the first going out upon the lawn on that most beautiful of nights, with the immense fellow slung in his frame like a great steam-engine, and working as easily; and the mountains of the moon striking out like bright points in the sky, and the little stars resolving themselves into double and even quadruple stars.… Those dialogues of Galileo are so beautiful. Mr. Bethune lent them us to read in the real old first edition.

At Embley the Nightingales saw something of the Palmerstons and the Ashburtons. With Miss Louisa Stewart Mackenzie, who afterwards became the second wife of the second Lord Ashburton, Florence formed a friendship which was one of the solaces and supports of her life at this time. Other friends who played a yet larger part in her life were Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge[20] of Atherstone, near Coventry. Florence sketches the character of some of her friends in a letter to her cousin Hilary (April 1846):—

Mrs. Keith, Miss Dutton, and Louisa Mackenzie, may be shortly described as the respective representatives of the Soul, the Mind, and the Heart. The first has one's whole worship, the second one's greatest admiration, and the third one's most lively interest. Mrs. Bracebridge may be described as all three; the Human Trinity in one; and never do I see her, without feeling that she is eyes to the blind and feet to the lame. Many a plan, which disappointment has thinned off into a phantom in my mind, takes form and shape and fair reality when touched by her Ithuriel's spear (for there is an Ithuriel's spear for good as well as for evil).

Dr. Richard Dawes, Dean of Hereford, who was an educational reformer, and Dr. Fowler of Salisbury, who anticipated the open-air treatment, and was otherwise a man of marked originality, were among those whose friendship she valued. If Florence Nightingale was to find her home life empty and unprofitable, it was not for lack of congenial friends.

She saw much, too, of general society, and Embley was often the scene of entertaining. We get a glimpse of its parties from an invitation which Mr. Nightingale sent to Miss Clarke (Oct. 1843) to bring her friend Leopold von Ranke with her on a visit:—

Pray send him a sly line to the effect that he will find Notabilities here on the 24th—to wit, the Speaker (Shaw Lefevre), the ex-Foreign Secretary (Palmerston), the Catholic Weld (future owner of Lulworth and nephew of the Cardinal of that ilk), and mayhap a Queen's Equerry or two, a Baron of the Exchequer (Rolfe), an Inspector, or rather Engineering Architect, of the new prisons,[21] and a couple of Baronets. He should think well on this. Yours, quizzically, but faithfully,W. E. N.

“Papa is quizzing the Baronets,” added Florence, “who are not wise ones. Provided you come, I care for nobody, no not I, and shall be quite satisfied. As M. de Something said to the Staël, ‘Nous aurons à nous deux de l'esprit pour quarante; vous pour quatre et moi pour zéro.’”

There were return invitations to great houses, and occasionally Florence retails their gossip, or her own reflections, for the benefit of cousins or aunts:—

(To Miss Hilary Bonham Carter.) 1845 (or early '46). What is the secret of Lady Jocelyn's sublime placidity? I never saw anything so lovely as she is, and she has lived four-and-twenty years of more excitement, I suppose, than ever fell to anybody's lot but an actress, all the young peerage having proposed to her. What gives her such a fulness of life now and makes her find enough in herself? It is not that she talks to Lord Palmerston or Lord Jocelyn, for she never does; and though she is very fond of her baby, she told me herself she did not care to play with it. Perhaps you will say it is want of earnestness, but, good gracious, my dear, if earnestness breaks one heart, who is fulfilling most the Creation's end—she who is breaking her heart, or this woman who has kept her serenity in the midst of excitement and her simplicity in unbounded admiration? The Palmerstons are certainly the most good-natured people under the stars to their guests.

We have been since to Sir William Heathcote's to meet the Ashburtons. I wish you had been there for the sake of the pictures, and also for the sake of the artistical dinner which, even I became aware, was such a dinner and such plate as has seldom blessed my housekeeping eyes. The Palmerstons, too, have had down all their pictures from London—such a Rembrandt, Pilate washing his hands. Lord Ashburton does not look much like a settler of a Boundary question.[22] She is an American, and we swore eternal friendship upon Boston; I having, you know, much curious information to give her upon that city and its inhabitants. She had a raspberry-tart of diamonds upon her forehead worth seeing. Then Mesmerism, and when we parted, we had got up so high into Vestiges[23] that I could not get down again, and was obliged to go off as an angel. The Ashburtons were the only people asked to meet the Queen at Strathfieldsaye (of her society). It was the most entire crash ever heard of, and the not asking the Palmerstons considered almost a personal insult; but they say the old Duke now cares for nothing but flattery, and asks nobody but masters of hounds. He almost ill-treated the Speaker. After dinner, they all stood at ease about the drawing-room, and behaved like so many soldiers on parade. The Queen did her very best to enliven the gloom, but was at last over-powered by numbers, gagged, and her hands tied. The only amusement was seeing Albert taught to miss at billiards.

V

Florence's remark that she would only provide the zéro of esprit to Miss Clarke's quatre, is by no means to be taken literally. She was attractive, and she attracted both men and women. She talked well, and often laid herself out to interest her companions, and sometimes confounded them with learning. In 1844 Julia Ward Howe was in England with her husband, Dr. Howe, and they visited the Nightingales at Embley. “Florence,” writes Mrs. Howe in her reminiscences, “was rather elegant than beautiful; she was tall and graceful of figure, her countenance mobile and expressive, her conversation most interesting.”[24] A reminiscence of a later date records an encounter with Sir Henry de la Bèche, the pioneer of the Geological Map of England. Warrenton Smythe and Sir Henry dined at Mr. Nightingale's, and Florence sat between them. “She began by drawing Sir Henry out on geology, and charmed him by the boldness and breadth of her views, which were not common then. She accidentally proceeded into regions of Latin and Greek, and then our geologist had to get out of it. She was fresh from Egypt, and began talking with W. Smythe about the inscriptions, etc., where he thought he could do pretty well; but when she began quoting Lepsius, which she had been studying in the original, he was in the same case as Sir Henry. When the ladies left the room, Sir Henry said to Smythe, ‘A capital young lady that, if she hadn't floored me with her Latin and Greek.’”[25] “I have been dowagering out with Papa,” wrote Florence to Miss Clarke (March 1843), “in the big coach to a formal dinner-party, where, however, Mr. Gerard Noel and I were very thick, he inquiring tenderly after you and your whereabouts.”

Florence Nightingale as a girl: about 1845
from a drawing by Miss Hilary Bonham Carter

Of Miss Nightingale's personal appearance in early womanhood, there are pen-pictures by very competent hands. Lady Lovelace, in her verses entitled A Portrait, Taken from Life, emphasises a certain spiritual aloofness in her friend:—

I saw her pass, and paused to think!
She moves as one on whom to gaze
With calm and holy thoughts, that link
The soul to God in prayer and praise.
She walks as if on heaven's brink,
Unscathed thro' life's entangled maze.

I heard her soft and silver voice
Take part in songs of harmony,
Well framed to gladden and rejoice;
Whilst her ethereal melody
Still kept my soul in wav'ring choice,
'Twixt smiles and tears of ecstasy.…

I deem her fair,—yes, very fair!
Yet some there are who pass her by,
Unmoved by all the graces there.
Her face doth raise no burning sigh,
Nor hath her slender form the glare
Which strikes and rivets every eye.

Her grave, but large and lucid eye,
Unites a boundless depth of feeling
With Truth's own bright transparency,
Her singleness of heart revealing;
But still her spirit's history
From light and curious gaze concealing.…

Mrs. Gaskell's picture in prose gives some lighter touches. “She is tall; very straight and willowy in figure; thick and shortish rich brown hair; very delicate complexion; grey eyes, which are generally pensive and drooping, but when they choose can be the merriest eyes I ever saw; and perfect teeth, making her smile the sweetest I ever saw. Put a long piece of soft net, and tie it round this beautifully shaped head, so as to form a soft white framework for the full oval of her face (for she had the toothache, and so wore this little piece of drapery), and dress her up in black silk, high up to the long, white round throat, and with a black shawl on, and you may get near an idea of her perfect grace and lovely appearance. She is so like a saint.”[26] She dressed becomingly; but had a saint's carelessness in such things, somewhat to her elder sister's despair. “Make Flo wear her white silk frock to-night,” she wrote on one occasion to her mother. Many years later, when stores and comforts were being sent out to the East under cover to the Lady-in-Chief, Lady Verney insinuated “one little gown for Flo,” and who will not love her for it? “When in 1849 she started to winter in the East, her mother says”—I quote again from Mrs. Gaskell—“they equipped her en princesse, and when she came back she had little besides the clothes she had on; she had given away her linen, etc., right and left to those who wanted it.”

VI

Those who have social gifts often find sufficient happiness in their exercise; but Florence, though she sometimes enjoyed the intercourse of intellectual society, reproached herself all the while for doing so. She felt increasingly that she had other gifts which were more properly hers, and that the life of society was a distraction into the wrong path. She found even the London season more congenial than the life of the hospitable country-house. “People talk of London gaieties,” she wrote to Miss Nicholson (“Aunt Hannah”); “but there you can at least have your mornings to yourself. To me the country is the place of ‘row.’ Since we came home in September, how long do you think we have been alone? Not one fortnight. A country-house is the real place for dissipation. Sometimes I think that everybody is hard upon me, that to be for ever expected to be looking merry and saying something lively is more than can be asked mornings, noons, and nights.”

When she was alone with her parents and her sister, she hardly found the life at home more satisfying. This was partly, as she confessed in many a page of self-examination, the result of her own shortcomings. “Ask me,” she wrote to “Aunt Hannah,” “to do something for your sake, something difficult, and you will see that I shall do it regularly, which is for me the most difficult thing of all.” Let those who reproach themselves for a desultoriness, seemingly incurable, take heart again from the example of Florence Nightingale! No self-reproach recurs more often in her private outpourings at this time than that of irregularity and even sloth. She found it difficult to rise early in the morning; she prayed and wrestled to be delivered from desultory thoughts, from idle dreaming, from scrappiness in unselfish work. She wrestled, and she won. When her capacities had found full scope in congenial work, nothing was more fixed and noteworthy in her life and work than regularity, precision, method, persistence. But in part, the failings with which she reproached herself were the fault of her circumstances. The fact of the two country homes militated against steady work in either. Her parents were not, indeed, careless or thoughtless beyond others in their station, but rather the reverse. Mr. Nightingale was a careful landlord and zealous in county business, and his wife took some interest, as I have already said, in village schools and charities. But to Florence's parents, these things were rather graces rightly incidental to their station, than the main business of life. Florence's more eager temperament and larger capacity craved for greater consistency in the energies of life. She was expected to play the part of Lady Bountiful one day, and to be equally ready to play that of Lady Graceful the next. A friend who visited at Lea Hurst recalls how Florence would often be missing in the evening, and on search being made she would be found in the village, sitting by the bedside of some sick person, and saying she could not sit down to a grand seven o'clock dinner while this was going on.[27] But by the time she had schooled herself to any regularity of work at Lea Hurst, the hour had come for moving to Embley. By the time she had settled down to work amongst her poor at Embley, the hour of the London season had struck. “I should be very glad,” she wrote to her aunt from Embley, “if I could have been left here when they went to London, as there is so much to be done, but as that would not be heard of, London is really my place of rest.”

The companionship which Florence had at home was sometimes wearisome to her. The sisters, as we have already seen, were not in full sympathy. The parents were not unintellectual persons, but, again, much the reverse. Mrs. Nightingale was a woman of bright intelligence, and of much social charm. Mr. Nightingale was a highly intellectual man, sensitive, too, and refined. He shot and hunted, but he was not ardently devoted to either sport, and was interested in many things. Perhaps in too many, and yet not enough in any. Florence Nightingale in her later years used sometimes to describe with a twinkle of affectionate humour the routine of a morning in her home life as a girl. Mama, we may suppose, was busy with housekeeping cares. Papa was very fond of reading aloud, and in order to interest his daughters, would take them through the whole of The Times, with many a comment, no doubt, by the way. “Now, for Parthe,” Miss Nightingale used to say, “the morning's reading did not matter; she went on with her drawing; but for me, who had no such cover, the thing was boring to desperation.” “To be read aloud to,” she wrote, “is the most miserable exercise of the human intellect. Or rather, is it any exercise at all? It is like lying on one's back, with one's hands tied, and having liquid poured down one's throat. Worse than that, because suffocation would immediately ensue, and put a stop to this operation. But no suffocation would stop the other.”[28] As the younger daughter of a busily efficient mother, Florence was not often entrusted with household duties; but on one occasion at any rate, she was left in command, and that, during the important season of jam-making. “My reign is now over,” she wrote to her cousin Hilary, who was an art-student (Dec. 1845); “angels and ministers of grace defend me from another! though I cannot but view my fifty-six pots with the proud satisfaction of an Artist, my head a little on one side, inspecting the happy effect of my works with more feeling of the Beautiful than Parthe ever had in hers.” And even housekeeping brought obstinate questionings with it to Florence. She describes a bout of it on another occasion in a letter to Madame Mohl (July 1847):—

I am up to my chin in linen and glass, and I am very fond of housekeeping. In this too-highly-educated, too-little-active age it, at least, is a practical application of our theories to something—and yet, in the middle of my lists, my green lists, brown lists, red lists, of all my instruments of the ornamental in culinary accomplishments which I cannot even divine the use of, I cannot help asking in my head, Can reasonable people want all this? Is all that china, linen, glass necessary to make man a Progressive animal? Is it even good Political Economy (query, for “good,” read “atheistical” Pol. Econ.?) to invent wants in order to supply employment? Or ought not, in these times, all expenditure to be reproductive? “And a proper stupid answer you'll get,” says the best Versailles service; “so go and do your accounts; there is one of us cracked.”

VII

Florence was an affectionate and dutiful daughter. She obeyed and yielded for many years. She strove hard to think that her duty lay at home, and that the trivial round and common task would furnish all that she had any right, before God or man, to ask. But as the sense of a vocation elsewhere strengthened and deepened in her mind, she may well have thought that, as her elder sister was contented to stay at home, a life of activity outside might for the other daughter not be inconsistent with affection for her parents.

She had, indeed, intellectual interests of her own. She read a great deal in English, French, German; in devotional works, in poetry, history, philosophy. And what she read she marked, and inwardly digested. A copy (unfortunately not complete) is preserved of the first edition of Browning's Paracelsus, which she annotated with remarks, paraphrases, and illustrative cases as she read. The first scene of the poem—“Paracelsus Aspires”—contains many a passage which aroused a sympathetic echo in her heart. The key-note is struck early. “Pursuing an aim not to be found in life,” is her comment, “is its true misery.” Then she kept commonplace-books, in which, under heads alphabetically arranged—such as Age of Reason, Bigotry, Creeds, Death, Education, and so forth—she copied out passages which struck her. She was accumulating stores of information and reflection. In some remarks upon Lacordaire in one of her note-books I find this passage copied out:—

I desire for a considerable time only to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing whatever I may have received of God to ripen, and turning it some day to the glory of His Name. Nowadays people are too much in a hurry both to produce and consume themselves. It is only in retirement, in silence, in meditation, that are formed the men who are called to exercise an influence on society.

For her own part, as her powers of reflection were strengthened, so did her sense of a vocation become more insistent with every year. In some autobiographical notes, Miss Nightingale records May 7, 1852, as the date at which she was conscious of “a call from God to be a saviour”; but the thought of devoting herself to be a nurse came much earlier. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in the reminiscences quoted above, describes how during the visit of herself and her husband to Embley in 1844, Florence had taken Dr. Howe aside and asked him this question: “If I should determine to study nursing, and to devote my life to that profession, do you think it would be a dreadful thing?” Dr. Howe, it will be remembered, was of wide repute as a philanthropist, and Miss Nightingale thought much of his opinion. It was favourable to her wish. “Not a dreadful thing at all,” he replied; “I think it would be a very good thing.” “My idea of heaven,” she wrote a little time afterwards, “is when my dear Aunt Hannah and I and my boy Shore and all of us shall be together, nursing the sick people who are left behind, and giving each other sympathies beside, and our Saviour in the midst of us, giving us strength.” But, meanwhile, she hoped to realize some little piece of the heaven on earth. She pursued other inquiries, laid her plans, kept her own counsel, and then made a first bid for freedom. The nature of her plans, the nipping of them in the bud by maternal frost, and her following dejection are told in a letter to her cousin Hilary (Dec. 11, 1845):—

Well, my dearest, I am not yet come to the great thing I wanted to say. I have always found that there was so much truth in the suggestion that you must dig for hidden treasures in silence or you will not find it; and so I dug after my poor little plan in silence, even from you. It was to go to be a nurse at Salisbury Hospital for these few months to learn the “prax.”; and then to come home and make such wondrous intimacies at West Wellow, under the shelter of a rhubarb powder and a dressed leg; let alone that no one could ever say to me again, your health will not stand this or that. I saw a poor woman die before my eyes this summer because there was no one but fools to sit up with her, who poisoned her as much as if they had given her arsenic. And then I had such a fine plan for those dreaded latter days (which I have never dreaded), if I should outlive my immediate ties, of taking a small house in West Wellow.—Well, I do not like much talking about it, but I thought something like a Protestant Sisterhood, without vows, for women of educated feelings, might be established. But there have been difficulties about my very first step, which terrified Mama. I do not mean the physically revolting parts of a hospital, but things about the surgeons and nurses which you may guess. Even Mrs. Fowler[29] threw cold water upon it; and nothing will be done this year at all events, and I do not believe—ever; and no advantage that I see comes of my living on, excepting that one becomes less and less of a young lady every year, which is only a negative one. You will laugh, dear, at the whole plan, I daresay; but no one but the mother of it knows how precious[45] an infant idea becomes; nor how the soul dies between the destruction of one and the taking up of another. I shall never do anything, and am worse than dust and nothing. I wonder if our Saviour were to walk the earth again, and I were to go to Him and ask, whether He would send me back to live this life again, which crushes me into vanity and deceit. Oh for some strong thing to sweep this loathsome life into the past.

And so ended for the time the dash of the caged bird for liberty.

CHAPTER III
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

Though the outward man may perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.—St. Paul.

The failure of her plan left Florence in a state of great dejection. “The day of personal hopes and fears,” she wrote, “is over for me. Now I dread and desire no more.” This was but a passing mood; and very soon, as we shall hear in the next chapter, she resumed, with increased determination, her struggle for freedom and self-expression in a life of action. But for the moment, and at many recurring moments in later years, the dejection was intense. It was not merely the disappointment of an eager mind denied its appropriate energy; it was the exceeding bitter cry of an intensely religious soul, tempted in its perplexity to ask, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

In some autobiographical notes Miss Nightingale recorded under the year 1843 “an illness and an acquaintance I made with a woman to whom all unseen things seemed real, and eternal things near, awakened me” [from dreaming]. The woman to whom she referred was, it may safely be conjectured, Miss Hannah Nicholson. They met once or twice a year—when Miss Nicholson visited Embley or Miss Nightingale stayed with Miss Nicholson's brother at Waverley. At other times they exchanged a voluminous correspondence, and this was almost entirely devoted to religious experiences and speculations. “Aunt Hannah” had inexhaustible sympathy with her self-torturing young friend. She did not chide or discourage Florence; but the burden of her message was the claim of the spiritual life, the message of Paul to the Corinthians. “Your whole life,” wrote Florence in one of many bursts of affectionate gratitude to Miss Nicholson, “seems to be love, and you always find words in your heart which, without the pretension of enlightening, yet are like a clearing up to me. You always seem to rest on the heart of the divine Teacher, and to participate in His mysteries.” “Your letters,” she said on another occasion, “stay by me and warm me when the dreams of life come one after another, clouding and covering the realities of the unseen.” To this sympathetic and (in some limited respects) kindred soul, Florence poured out unreservedly the experiences of her spiritual life; as also, sometimes, though with more conscious art of literary expression, to Miss Clarke in Paris.

II

A few letters, selected from a great number, will serve to trace the course of her religious thoughts. They resumed, it will be seen, the spiritual experiences and convictions of the saints who have served mankind. The Reality of the Unseen World is the subject of a letter to Miss Clarke (August 1846), in which, after a page of family news, she continues:—

But I think you must be tired of all this, for I fancy that you live much more in the supernatural than the natural world. I always believe in Homer; and in St. Paul's “cloud of witnesses”; and in the old Italian pictures, which have a first story, where the Unseen live au premier, with a two-pair back, where the Père Eternel's shadow is half seen peeping out, and a ground floor where poor mortals live, but still have a connexion with the establishment above stairs. I like those books, where the Invisible communicates freely with the Visible Kingdom; not that they ever come up to one's idea, which is always so much brighter than the execution (for the word is only the shadow cast by the light of the thought); but they are suggestive. I always believe in a multitude of spirits inhabiting the same house with ourselves; we are only the entresol, quite the most insignificant of its lodgers, and too busy with our pursuit of daily[48] bread, too much confined with hard work, and too full of the struggle with the material world, to visit the glorious beings immediately about us—whom we shall see, when the present candle of our earthly reason is put out, which blinds us just as the candle end, left burning after one is in bed, long prevents us from seeing the world without, lit up by the full moon. It trembles and flickers and sinks into its socket, and then we catch a bright stripe of moonlight shining on the floor; but it flares up again, and the silvery stream is gone “as if it could not be, as if it had not been,” and we can see nothing but the candle, and hardly imagine any other light—till at last it goes quite out, and the flood of moonlight rushes into the room, and every pane of the casement window, and every ivy leaf without, are stamped, as it were, upon the floor, and a whole world revealed to us, which that flickering candle was the means of concealing from us. This is what Jesus Christ meant, I suppose, when He said that He must go away in order to be with His friends in His spirit, that He would be much nearer to them after death than in the flesh. In the flesh, we were separated from our friends by their going into the next room only—a door, a partition divided us; but what can separate two souls? Often I fancy that we can perceive the presence of a good spirit communicating thoughts to us: are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister unto us? When Jesus Christ warns us not to despise any one, because that in Heaven their angels do always behold the face of His Father, perhaps He thought that our beloved ones, who are gone, might be these our “angels,” who must therefore have communion with men.

It is here, where a cold and false life of conventionalism and prejudices and frivolity is often all that reaches our outward senses, that we are sometimes baffled in seeing into the life which lies beneath; it is here, amidst the tempers and little vexations, which are the shadows that dim the brightest intercourse, it is here that we fail sometimes in having intimate communion with souls, and we stop short at the dead coverings; but between the soul which is free, and our soul, what barrier, what restraint can there be? Human sympathy is indeed necessary to our happiness of every moment, and the absence of it makes an awful void in our life. Every room becomes a grave, and every book we used to read together a monument to the one we love. But some one says, that we need an idée merveilleuse to preserve us from the busy devils, which imagination here is always conjuring up. This idée merveilleuse, I think, is the idea of the loving presence of spirits. Those dear ones are safe, and yet with us still, for truly do I believe that these senses of ours are what veil from us, not discover to us, the world around (which is[49] sometimes revealed to us in dreams, or in moments of excitement, as at the point of death, either our own or a friend's, or by mesmerism, or by faith). Faith is the real eye and ear of the soul, and as it would be impossible to describe the harmony and melody of Music to one who was born deaf, or to make a blind man perceive the beauty of the effects of colour, so without faith the spiritual world is as much a hidden one to the soul as the Art of Painting to the blind man. On a dark night the moon, when at last she rises, reveals to us, just at our feet, a world of objects, of the presence of which we were not aware before. We see the river sparkling in the moonbeams close beside us, and the tall shadows sleeping quietly on the grass, and the sharp relief of the architectural cornices, and the strong outline of the lights and shades, so well defined that we can scarcely believe that a moment ago, and we did not see them. What shall we say if, one day, the moon rises upon our spiritual world, and we see close at hand, ready to hold the most intimate communion with us, those spirits, whom we had loved and mourned as lost to us? We are like the blind men by the wayside, and ought to sit and cry, Lord that we may receive our sight! And, when we do receive it, we shall perhaps find that we require no transporting into another world, to become aware of the immediate presence of an Infinite Spirit, and of other lesser ones whom we thought gone. What we require is sight, not change of place, I believe.

The struggle which absorbed Florence's mind and heart was to establish some harmony between her dealings in the world of sense and her communion with the unseen world. She reproached herself for impatience, for selfishness, for lack of confidence in the good time of God. Happy are they who have no more occasion than she to deem themselves unprofitable servants! But the condition of attainment to comparative sinlessness is, I suppose, the Conviction of Sin; and this was intensely present to Florence Nightingale. “I have read over your letters many times again and again since I have been here,” she wrote from Tapton (her grandmother Shore's house) in 1845. “Ah, my dear Aunt Hannah, you are like the white swan on your cool, fresh, blue lake, rocked to peace and rest by the sweet winds of your faith and love, and you cannot be dragged down into our busy chicken-yard of struggling, scratting life.[30] You do not know what it is, when one has sinned with such aggravation as I have. No one has had such advantages, and I have sinned with all these, and after having been made to know what sin was, and what my obligations were. No one has so grieved the Holy Spirit. I have sinned against my conviction, and, as it were, standing before God's judgment-seat.” In many of Miss Nightingale's religious outpourings, both in letters and in private diaries, there is a note which borders on the morbid; but the danger-point is averted, sometimes by practical good sense, and sometimes by a saving sense of humour. The letter, just given, was soon followed by another (from Embley, Oct. 1845), containing this account of a scene at the bedside of her favourite little cousin:—“One night when I was reading to Shore the verse about the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and we were agreeing that the temptations of the flesh were liking a great deal of play and no work, and lying long bed, and the temptations of the world liking to be praised and admired, and be a general favourite, and so on, more than anything else, and we were both very much affected, he said before I left him, ‘Now I may lie in bed to-morrow, and you won't call me at six, will you?’ And I too went away to dream about a great many things which I had much better not think about. Oh, how I did laugh at the results of all our feelings! To think and to be are two such different things!”

To bring thought and action into harmony, to make the presence of the Unseen a guide through the path of this present world: that is the problem of the practically religious life. To Florence Nightingale, communion with the Unseen meant something deeper, richer, fuller, more positive than the fear of God. The fear of God is the beginning, but not the end, of wisdom, for perfect love casteth out fear. It was for the love of God as an active principle in her mind, constraining all her deeds, that she strove. When she was conscious of falling away from this grace, she knew the pains of hell, here and now, as the state of a soul in estrangement from the Eternal goodness:—

(To Miss Nicholson.) Embley, Christmas Eve [undated]. Think of me to-morrow at the Sacrament. I have not taken it since I last took it with you, except once, with a poor woman[51] on her death-bed. Time has sped wearily with me since then, Aunt Hannah. If, when the plough goes over the soul, there were always the hand of the Sower there to scatter the seed after it, who would regret? But how often the seed-time has passed, it is too late, the harrow has gone over, the time of harvest has come and the harvest is not.… Give me your thoughts to-morrow, my dear Aunt Hannah; I want them sadly; and take me with you to the Throne of Grace. Bless me too, as poor Esau said. I have so felt with him, and cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, Bless me, even me also, O my Father; but He never has yet, and I have not deserved that He should.

(To Miss Nicholson, May 1846.) “The sorrows of hell compassed me about.” We learn to know what these are beforehand, when we cannot command our thoughts to pray, when all our omissions give themselves form and life, and shut us up within a wall over which there is no looking, no return: when they hold us down with a resistless power, and we are hemmed in with our remembrances, like a cell compassing us about. What can the future hell be other than this? The Unspeakable Presence may be joy and peace unspeakable, but it may be a Horror, a Dweller on our Threshold, a Spirit of Fear to the stricken conscience. Jesus Christ prayed on the Cross not for life or safety, but only for the light of His countenance: Why hast Thou forsaken me? And all sorrows disappear before that one. Let those who have felt it say if it is not so, and if there is any sorrow like unto that sorrow. How willingly would we exchange it for pain, which we almost welcome as a proof of His care and attention. Grief in itself is no evil; as making the Unseen, the Eternal, and the Infinite present to our consciousness, it is rather a good. But when all one's imaginations are wandering out of one's reach, then one realizes the future state of punishment even in this world. Pray that He will not leave my soul in hell. How little can be done under the spirit of fear; it is the very sentence pronounced upon the serpent, “Upon thy belly shalt thou go all the days of thy life.” Oh, if any one thinks that, in the repentance of fear, this is the time for the soul to open to the Infinite goodness, to the spirit of love and of power and of a sound mind, in the heart's death to live and love,—let him try how hard it is to collect oneself out of distraction—let him feel the woes of saying To-morrow, when God has said To-day; and then when he has found how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem all the uses of the world, let him try with a dead heart to live unto God, to love with all his strength when all energy to love is gone.

The state of perfect love, expressing itself in perfect rightness of thought and deed, may be unattainable on earth, but nothing lower than the search for this ideal can satisfy the yearnings of a soul such as was Florence Nightingale's. She had the Hunger for Righteousness. “The crown of righteousness!” she wrote to Miss Nicholson (May 1846). “That word always strikes me more than anything in the Bible. Strange that not happiness, not rest, not forgiveness, not glory, should have been the thought of that glorious man's mind, when at the eve of the last and greatest of his labours; all desires so swallowed up in the one great craving after righteousness that, at the end of all his struggles, it was mightier within him than ever, mightier even than the desire of peace. How can people tell one to dwell within a good conscience, when the chief of all the apostles so panted after righteousness that he considered it the last best gift, unattainable on earth, to be bestowed in Heaven?”

To do All for the Love of God was the ideal which she sought to attain. “The foundation of all must be the love of God. That the sufferings of Christ's life were intense, who doubts? but the happiness must also have been intense. Only think of the happiness of working, and working successfully too, and with no doubts as to His path, and with no alloy of vanity or love of display or glory, but with the ecstasy of single-heartedness! All that I do is always poisoned by the fear that I am not doing it in simplicity and godly sincerity.” This was one of the constant dreads throughout her life. When she had become famous, and was praised and courted by the popular breath, she shrank, with an abhorrence which some may have considered almost morbid and which was certainly foreign to the fashion of the world, from any avoidable publicity. This was no pose or affectation; it was part of her religion. It was a counsel dictated by her earnest striving to dissociate her work for God from any taint of worldliness.

III

The world which came to owe much to the life and example of Florence Nightingale, owes something to Miss Nicholson, whose gentle sympathy brought to her young friend much strength and peace. But the world may also be glad, I think, that Miss Nightingale's religious thought worked itself out in the end on lines of her own. Florence Nightingale has been enrolled by the popular voice among the saints; but there are saints and saints—saints contemplative or mystic, and saints active and ministering. In all ages of the world there have been godly women whose passion of religious spirit has led them to lives of professional pieties, rather than of practical service; who have spent in ecstasies of pity, or in tortures of self-abasement at the foot of the Cross, powers which might have gone to redeem and save the world. Florence Nightingale had, as we have sufficiently seen, a profound sense of personal religion. She felt, as all the saints must feel, that a religious life means a state of the soul; but she attained also to the conviction, which became ever stronger within her, that a state of the soul can only be approved by its fruits, and that thus the Service of God is the Service of Man:—

(To Miss Nicholson.) Embley, Sept. 24, [1846]. I am almost heart-broken to leave Lea Hurst. There are so many duties there which lie near at hand, and I could be well content to do them there all the days of my life. I have left so many poor friends there whom I shall never see again, and so much might have been done for them.… I feel my sympathies are with Ignorance and Poverty. The things which interest me interest them; we are alike in expecting little from life, much from God; we are taken up with the same objects.… My imagination is so filled with the misery of this world that the only thing in which to labour brings any return, seems to me helping and sympathizing there; and all that poets sing of the glories of this world appears to me untrue: all the people I see are eaten up with care or poverty or disease. I know that it was God who created the good, and man the evil, which was not the will of God, but the necessary consequence of His leaving free-will to man. I know that misery is the alphabet of fire, in which history, with its warning hand, writes in flaming letters the consequences of Evil (the Kingdom of Man), and that without its glaring light, we should never see the path back into the Kingdom of God, or heed the directing guide-posts. But the judgments of nature (the law of God), as she goes her mighty, solemn, inflexible march, sweeps sometimes so fearfully over[54] man that though it is the triumph, not the defeat of God's truth and of His laws, that falsehood against them must work misery, and misery is perhaps here the strongest proof that His loving hand is present,—yet all our powers, hopes, and fears must, it seems to me, be engrossed by doing His work for its relief. Life is no holiday game, nor is it a clever book, nor is it a school of instruction, nor a valley of tears; but it is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling with the Principle of Evil, hand to hand, foot to foot. Every inch of the way must be disputed. The night is given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power. The day, to use the strength which has been given us, to go forth to work with it till the evening. The Kingdom of God is coming; and “Thy Kingdom come” does not mean only “My salvation come.”

“To find out what we can do,” she wrote as an annotation in Browning's Paracelsus, “one's individual place, as well as the General End, is man's task. To serve man for God's sake, not man's, will prevent failure from being disappointment.” Florence Nightingale sought then to save her soul by serving others.

It was by this same test of practical service that she came to try and to weigh the various forms of religious doctrine. Her father was, as I have said, a Unitarian, and several other members of her family circle were of the same persuasion. But she and some others of that circle conformed in practice to the services of the English Church. And so, in some degree, Miss Nightingale continued to conform to the end of her life; though, as we shall find later on, she departed widely from the doctrines of the Church as ordinarily received, did not care about “going to church,” and framed a creed of her own. But she always had a tolerant mind for any faith that issued in good works, and an impatience with any that did not. It is for this reason that she seemed to be all things to all men in religious matters. Her mission to the Crimea involved, as we shall learn, some religious bickerings. Protestants thought her too indulgent to Roman Catholics, and Catholics were sore that she did not go further with them. But her real attitude is perfectly clear, and was entirely consistent. If she looked with a favouring eye on Roman Catholics, it was on account, not of their dogmas, but of their deeds. Two letters to Madame Mohl, ten years apart in date, suggest what was always Miss Nightingale's point of view:—

Lea Hurst, Sept. [1841]. We are very anxious to hear, dearest Miss Clarke, how you are going on, and how Mrs. Clarke is, some day when you are able to write. We are just returned from the Leeds Consecration, and a more curious or interesting sight I never saw. Imagine a procession of 400 clergymen, all in their white robes, with scarfs of blue and black and fur and even scarlet, so that I thought some of them were cardinals, headed by the Archbishop of York,[31] the Bishop of Ripon, &c., and most curious of all the Bishop of New Jersey to whom Dr. Hook (who is,—you know, perhaps,—the Puseyite vicar of Leeds) had written to ask him to come over from America, expressly to preach the consecration sermon. Imagine all this procession, entering the church, repeating the 24th Ps.—and then filling the space before the altar and the Transept—and all responding aloud through the service, so that the roll and echo of their responses through the Transept, without being able to see them, was the most striking thing I ever heard. It was quite a gathering-place for Puseyites from all parts of England. Papa heard them debating, whether they should have lighted candles before the Altar, but they decided no, because the Bishop of Ripon would not like it—however they had them in the evening and the next morning when he was gone—and Dr. Hook has the regular Catholic jerk in making the genuflexion every time he approaches the altar. The church is a most magnificent one, and every one has contributed their best to it, with a true Catholic spirit; one gave the beautiful painted window, another the Correggio for the Altar piece, the Queen Dowager the Altar-cloth, another the bells, &c., &c. Dr. Hook gives a service every morning and evening at ½ p. 7, and the Sacrament every Sunday; and the aisle is all occupied by open seats. During the consecration I wished to have been a clergyman, but when Mrs. Gaskell[32] (whom I was with, she is a good Tory and half a Puseyite and withal the most general favourite and generally lenient person in England)—when she and I came down afterwards for the Sacrament, I could not help looking in the faces of the clergymen, for the impression I expected to see, as they walked down the aisle, and wandered about, (this immense crowd) after the Sacrament—and oh! I was woefully disappointed—they looked so stupid; and I could not help thinking, If you had been Catholics, you would[56] all have been on your knees during the service, without minding your fine gowns and the cold stones.

Embley, Feb. 7 [1851].… I suppose you know how the two churches have been convulsing themselves in England in a manner discreditable to themselves and ridiculous to others. The Anglican Ch. screamed and struggled as if they were taking away something of hers, the Catholic Ch. sang and shouted as if she had conquered England—neither the one nor the other has happened. Only a good many people (in our Church) found out they were Catholics and went to Rome, and a good many other people found out they were Protestants, which they never knew before, and left the Puseyite pen, which has now lost half its sheep. At Oxford the Puseyite volcano is extinct.… You know what a row there will be this Session in Parliament about it. The most moderate wish for a Concordat, but even these say that we must strip the R.C. Bishops of their new titles. Many think the present Gov. will go out upon it, because they won't do enough to satisfy the awakened prejudices of dear John Bull. I used to think it was a mere selfish quarrel between red stockings and lawn sleeves; but not a bit of it; it's a real popular feeling. One would think that all our religion was political by the way we talk, and so I believe it is. From the rising of the sun until the going down of the same, you hear our clergy talking of nothing but Bishops versus Vicars General—never a word of different plans of education, prisons, penitentiaries, and so on. One would think we were born ready made as to education, but that Art made a Church.

I feel little zeal in pulling down one Church or building up another, in making Bishops or unmaking them. If they would make us, our Faith would spring up of itself, and then we shouldn't want either Anglican Ch. or R.C. Church to make it for us. But, bless my soul, people are just as ignorant now of any law in the human mind as they were in Socrates' time. We have learnt the physical laws since then; but mental laws—why, people don't even acknowledge their existence. They talk of grace and divine influence,—why, if it's an arbitrary gift from God, how unkind of Him not to give it before! And if it comes by certain laws, why don't we find them out? But people in England think it quite profane to talk of finding them out, and they pray “That it may please Thee to have mercy upon all men,” when I should knock you down if you were to say to me “That it should please you to have mercy upon your boy.” I never had any training; and training to be called “training,” (as we train the fingers to play[57] scales and shakes)—I doubt whether anybody ever gets from other people, because they don't know how to give it according to any certain laws. I wish everybody would write as far as they can A Short Account of God's Dealings with them, like the old Puritans, and then perhaps we should find out at last what are God's ways in His goings on and what are not.

Arthur Stanley (afterwards the Dean) once asked her to use her influence in preventing a friend of his and of hers from taking the step, supposed to be imminent, of joining the Roman Communion. In a long reply which Miss Nightingale wrote with great care (Nov. 26, 1852), she promised to do what she could, but explained that this might not be much. She herself remained in the Anglican Communion “because she was born there,” and because the Roman Church offered some things which she personally did not want. She feared their friend might consider that such arguments as she could urge against the Roman Church applied equally against the Anglican. And, on the other hand, she had never concealed her opinion that the Roman Communion offered advantages to women which the Church of England (at that time) did not. “The Catholic orders,” she wrote, “offered me work, training for that work, sympathy and help in it, such as I had in vain sought in the Church of England. The Church of England has for men bishoprics, archbishoprics, and a little work (good men make a great deal for themselves). For women she has—what? I had no taste for theological discoveries. I would have given her my head, my heart, my hand. She would not have them. She did not know what to do with them. She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother's drawing-room; or, if I were tired of that, to marry and look well at the head of my husband's table. You may go to the Sunday School, if you like it, she said. But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do for her, nor education for it.”

The latter part of the second letter to Miss Clarke shows Miss Nightingale's interest in speculations about the basis of moral law; but so far as the rivalry of Churches was concerned, it was by works that she tried them. “In all the dens of disgrace and disease,” she wrote in one of her note-books (1849), “the only clergy who deserve the name of pastors are the Roman Catholic. The rest, of all denominations—Church of England, Church of Scotland, Dissenters—are only theology or tea mongers.” “It will never do,” she once said to a friend, “unless we have a Church of which the terms of membership shall be works, not doctrines.”[33]

She was interested, however, in doctrines also. If she was resolved to dedicate her life to the Service of Man, she was no less convinced that such service could only be rendered, at the best and highest, in the light, and with the sanction, of Service to God. Herein may be found an underlying unity and harmony through the many and diverse interests of her life. We shall see that she who opened new careers and standards of practical benevolence in the modern world, spent also years of thought upon the less manageable task, if not of providing the world with a new religion, at any rate of giving to old doctrines a new application, and, as she hoped, a more acceptable sanction.

CHAPTER IV
DISAPPOINTMENT
(1846–1847)

There are Private Martyrs as well as burnt or drowned ones. Society of course does not know them; and Family cannot, because our position to one another in our families is, and must be, like that of the Moon to the Earth. The Moon revolves round her, moves with her, never leaves her. Yet the Earth never sees but one side of her; the other side remains for ever unknown.—Florence Nightingale (in a Note-book of 1847–49).

A poet of our time has counted “Disappointment's dry and bitter root” among the ingredients of “the right mother-milk to the tough hearts that pioneer their kind.” If it indeed be so, Florence Nightingale was well nurtured. The spiritual experiences and speculations, recorded in the last chapter, worked round to a justification, as we have seen, of her chosen plan of life. Religion thus brought no consolation for the failure of her scheme to escape in December 1845. “My misery and vacuity afterwards,” she wrote in an autobiographical retrospect, “were indescribable.” “All my plans have been wrecked,” she wrote at the time, “and my hopes destroyed, and yet without any visible, any material change.” She faced the new year and its life on the old lines in a mood of depression which, with some happier intervals, was to grow deeper and more intense during the next few years.

She did not, however, abandon her ideal. We shall see in subsequent chapters that neither foreign travel distracted her from it, nor did opportunities for another kind of life allure her from the chosen path. The way was dark before her; the goal might never be reached, she often thought, in this present sphere; but she felt increasingly that only in a life of nursing or other service to the afflicted could her being find its end and scope. “The longer I live,” she wrote in her diary (June 22, 1846), “the more I feel as if all my being was gradually drawing to one point, and if I could be permitted to return and accomplish that in another being, if I may not in this, I should need no other heaven. I could give up the hope of meeting and living with those I have loved (and nobody knows how I love) and been separated from here, if it would please God to give me, with a nearer consciousness of His Presence, the task of doing this in the real life.”

Meanwhile she pursued her inquiries. Now that the fruits of Florence Nightingale's pioneer work have been gathered, and that nursing is one of the recognized occupations for gentlewomen, it is not altogether easy to realize the difficulties which stood in her way. The objections were moral and social, rooted to large measure in conventional ideas. Gentlewomen, it was felt, would be exposed, if not to danger and temptations, at least to undesirable and unfitting conditions. “It was as if I had wanted to be a kitchen-maid,” she said in later years. Nothing is more tenacious than a social prejudice. But the prejudice was in part founded on very intelligible reasons, and in part was justified by the level of the nursing profession at the time. These are considerations to which full weight must be allowed, both in justice to those who opposed Miss Nightingale's plans, and in order to understand her own courage and persistence. The idea was widely prevalent at the time that for certain cases in hospital practice a modest woman was, from the nature of things, unsuited to act as a nurse. Mr. Nightingale, who desired to do what was right by his daughter, made many inquiries, and consulted many friends. There is a letter to him from a Brighton doctor arguing against the prevalent belief, and maintaining stoutly that “women of a proper age and character are not unfit for such cases. Age, habit, and office give the mind a different turn.” But the whole of this letter shows a degree of broad-mindedness with regard to the education and sphere of women which was in advance of the average opinion at the time. And in any case, whether women were fit or unfit by nature, it was certain that many, perhaps most, of the women actually engaged in nursing were unfit by character, and that a refined gentlewoman, who joined the profession, might thus find herself in unpleasant surroundings. We shall have to consider this matter more fully in a subsequent chapter. Here it will suffice to say that though there were better-managed hospitals and worse-managed, yet there was a strong body of evidence to show that hospital nurses had opportunities, which they freely used, for putting the bottle to their lips “when so disposed,” and that other evils were more or less prevalent also.[34] Reports from Paris and its famous schools of medicine and surgery were no better. One who had been through it said that life at the “Maternité” was very coarse. In the clinique obstétricale at the École de Médecin, “the élèves have the reputation of being pretty generally the students' mistresses.” The difficulties in the way of a refined woman, who sought to obtain access to the best training, were very great. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, a pioneer among woman-doctors in America, told Miss Nightingale of a young girl who had planned, as the only feasible way of studying surgery in Paris, to don male attire. “Pantaloons will be accepted as a token she is in earnest, while a petticoat is always a flag for intrigue. She has a deep voice, and I think will pass muster exceedingly well among a set of young students, but I shall be quite sorry for her to sacrifice a mass of beautiful dark auburn hair! What a strange age we live in! What singular sacrifices and extraordinary actions are required of us in the service of truth! An age of reform is a stirring, exciting one, but it is not the most beautiful.” The more she heard of the worst, the more was Florence Nightingale resolved to make things better; but the more her parents heard, the greater and the more natural was their repugnance. Somebody must do the rough pioneer work of the world; but one can understand how the parents of an attractive daughter, for whom their own life at home seemed to them to open many possibilities of comfortable happiness, came to desire that in this case the somebody should be somebody else.

Miss Nightingale herself was so much impressed by the difficulties and dangers in the way of women nurses, that she was inclined at first to the idea that the admission of gentlewomen into the calling could best be secured, either in special hospitals connected with some religious institution, or in general hospitals under cover of some religious bond. “I think,” wrote Monckton Milnes to his wife, “that Florence always much distrusted the Sisterhood matter,”[35] and such was the case. Her inner thought was that no vow was needed other than the nurse's own fitness for the calling and devotion to it. But she was engaged in the crusade of a pioneer, and had to consider what was practically expedient and immediately feasible, as well as what was theoretically reasonable. Dr. Blackwell was of the same opinion. She did not like religious orders in themselves; they only “become beautiful,” she said, “as an expedient, a temporary condition, an antidote to present evils.” Miss Nightingale was therefore intensely interested in the Institution for Deaconesses, with its hospital, school, and penitentiary, which a Protestant minister, Pastor Theodor Fliedner, had established some years before at Kaiserswerth. Her family were great friends with the Bunsens, and the Baron had sent Florence one of Pastor Fliedner's Annual Reports.[36] Her interest in it was twofold. It was the kind of institution to which Protestant mothers might not object to send their daughters. It was also in some sort a school of nursing where, whatever wider scope might afterwards be attainable, gentlewomen could serve an apprenticeship to the calling. “Flo,” wrote her sister to a friend in 1848, “is exceedingly full of the Hospital Institutions of Germany, which she thinks so much better than ours. Do you know anything of the great establishment at Kaiserswerth, where the schools, the reform place for the wicked, and a great hospital are all under the guidance of the Deaconesses?” Two years before (June 1846) Florence herself had written to Miss Hilary Bonham Carter, begging her to ask Mrs. Jameson about “the German lady she knew, who, not being a Catholic, could not take upon herself the vows of a Sister of Charity, but who obtained permission from the physician of the hospital of her town to attend the sick there, and perform all the duties which the Sœurs do at Dublin and the Hôtel Dieu, and who had been there fifteen years when Mrs. Jameson knew her. I do not want to know her name, if it is a secret; but only if she has extended it further into anything like a Protestant Sisterhood, if she had any plans of that sort which should embrace women of an educated class, and not, as in England, merely women who would be servants if they were not nurses. How she disposed of the difficulties of surgeons making love to her, and of living with the women of indifferent character who generally make the nurses of hospitals, as it appears she was quite a young woman when she began, and these are the difficulties which vows remove which one sees nothing else can.” Perhaps it was as a result of these inquiries that Florence Nightingale became acquainted, through Baron von Bunsen, with the institution at Kaiserswerth; though, as appears from a letter given below, Madame Mohl had also sent her some information about it. It is certain that by the autumn of 1846 she was in possession of its Reports, and that the place had become the home of her heart. During these years she was also quietly pursuing studies on medical and sanitary subjects.

II

With such thoughts in her mind, the routine of home life became more than ever empty and distasteful. Here are two typical extracts from her diary of 1846:—

Lea Hurst, July 7. What is my business in this world and what have I done this last fortnight? I have read the Daughter at Home[64] [37] to Father and two chapters of Mackintosh; a volume of Sybil to Mama. Learnt seven tunes by heart. Written various letters. Ridden with Papa. Paid eight visits. Done company. And that is all.

Embley, Oct. 7. What have I done the last three months? O happy, happy six weeks at the Hurst, where (from July 15 to Sept. 1) I had found my business in this world. My heart was filled. My soul was at home. I wanted no other heaven. May God be thanked as He never yet has been thanked for that glimpse of what it is to live. Now for the last five weeks my business has been much harder. They don't know how weary this way of life is to me—this table d'hôte of people.… When I want Erfrischung I read a little of the Jahresberichte über die Diakonissen-Anstalt in Kaiserswerth. There is my home; there are my brothers and sisters all at work. There my heart is, and there I trust one day will be my body; whether in this state or in the next, in Germany or in England, I do not care.

The “happy six weeks at Lea Hurst” were a time, as appears from the letter to Miss Nicholson already given (p. [53]), when she found opportunity to do much sick-visiting. “One's days pass away,” she added in the same letter, “like a shadow, and leave not a trace behind. How we spend hours that are sacred in things that are profane, which we choose to call necessities, and then say ‘We cannot’ to our Father's business.” At Embley the opportunities for work among the poor were less favourable. The distances were greater. Florence interested herself, so far as she was able, in the school at Wellow; and amongst her papers of 1846 there is an able discussion of the defects of elementary education as she had there observed them. But the distractions were many. There was a constant round of company at home; and, as has been said before, the migrations of the family between London, Lea Hurst, and Embley were fatal to concentration of effort.

III

The year 1847 was one of much social movement in Miss Nightingale's life. In the spring she was in London “doing the exhibitions and hearing Jenny Lind; but it really requires a new language to define her.” Then she went with her parents to the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, where Adams and Leverrier, the twin discoverers of Neptune, were the lions of the day. She wrote many lively accounts of the meeting to her friends, from which a passage or two may be given:—

Here we are in the midst of loveliness and learning; for never anything so beautiful as this place is looking now, my dearest, have I seen abroad or at home, with its flowering acacias in the midst of its streets of palaces. I saunter about the churchyards and gardens by myself before breakfast, and wish I were a College man. I wish you could see the Astronomical Section—Leverrier and Adams sitting on either side of the President, like a pair of turtle-doves cooing at their joint star and holding it between them.… We work hard. Chapel at 8, to that glorious service at New College; such an anthem yesterday morning! and that quiet cloister where no one goes. I brought home a white rose to-day to dry in remembrance. Sections from 11 to 3. Then Colleges or Blenheim till dinner time. Then lecture at 8 in the Radcliffe Library. And philosophical tea and muffins at somebody's afterwards. The Fowlers, Hamilton Grays, Barlows and selves are the muffins; Wheatstone, Hallam, Chevalier, Monckton Milnes and some of the great guns occasionally are the philosophy.…

and so forth, and so forth; with particulars of “church every two hours” on Sunday, and of a luncheon with Buckland and his famous menagerie at Christ Church, when Florence petted a little bear, and her father drew her away, but Mr. Milnes mesmerised it. “And one thing more,” she adds; “Mr. Hallam's discovery that Gladstone is the Beast 666 (in the Revelations) came to him one day by inspiration in the Athenæum, after he had tried Pusey and Newman, and found that they wouldn't do.”

Miss Nightingale paid many visits during the same year with her father. They went, for instance, to Lord Sherborne, whose daughter, Mrs. Plunkett, became a great friend of hers; and they spent a couple of days with Lord Lovelace. Lady Lovelace, Byron's daughter, conceived a great admiration for Florence Nightingale, which found expression in the verses already quoted. It was in this year that Miss Clarke married her old admirer, M. Mohl. Florence's letter of congratulation was not without significance upon the state of her own feelings, as will be seen in a later chapter:—

Embley, October 13 [1847]. Dearest Friend—To think that you are now a two months' wife, and I have never written to tell you that your piece of news gave me more joy than I ever felt in all my life, except once, no, not even excepting that once, because that was a game of Blind-man's-Buff,—and in your case you knew even as you were known. I had the news on a Sunday from dear Ju, and it was indeed a Sunday joy and I kept it holy, though not like the city, which was to be in cotton to be looked at only on Sundays. As has often been said, we must all take Sappho's leap, one way or other, before we attain to her repose—though some take it to death, and some to marriage, and some again to a new life even in this world.

Which of them to the better part, God only knows. Popular prejudice gives it in favour of marriage. Should we not look upon marriage, less as an absolute blessing, than as a remove into another and higher class of this great school-room—a promotion—for it is a promotion, which creates new duties, before which the coward sometimes shrinks, and gives new lessons, of more advanced knowledge, with more advanced powers to meet them, and a much clearer power of vision to read them. In your new development of life, I take, dearest friend, a right fervent interest, and bless you with a right heartfelt and earnest love.

We are only just returned to Embley, after having passed through London, on our way from Derbyshire. News have I none, excepting financial, for no one could talk of anything in London excepting the horrid quantity of failures in the City, by which all England has suffered more or less. Why didn't I write before? Because I thought you would rather be let alone at first and that you were on your travels.

And now for my confessions. I utterly abjure, I entirely renounce and abhor, all that I may have said about M. Robert Mohl, not because he is now your brother-in-law, but because I was so moved and touched by the letters which he wrote after your marriage to Mama; so anxious they were to know more about you, so absorbed in the subject, so eager to prove to us that his brother was such a man, he was quite sure to make you happy.

And I have not said half enough either upon that score, not anything that I feel; how “to marry” is no impersonal[67] verb, upon which I am to congratulate you, but depends entirely upon the Accusative Case which it governs, upon which I do wish you heartfelt and trusting joy. In single life the stage of the Present and the Outward World is so filled with phantoms, the phantoms, not unreal tho' intangible, of Vague Remorse, Tears, dwelling on the threshold of every thing we undertake alone, Dissatisfaction with what is, and Restless Yearnings for what is not, cravings after a world of wonders (which is, but is like the chariot and horses of fire, which Elisha's frightened servant could not see, till his eyes were opened)—the stage of actual life gets so filled with these that we are almost pushed off the boards and are conscious of only just holding on to the foot lights by our chins, yet even in that very inconvenient position love still precedes joy, as in St. Paul's list, for love laying to sleep these phantoms (by assuring us of a love so great that we may lay aside all care for our own happiness, not because it is of no consequence to us, whether we are happy or not, as Carlyle says, but because it is of so much consequence to another) gives that leisure frame to our mind, which opens it at once to joy.

But how impertinently I ramble on—“You see a penitent before you,” don't say “I see an impudent scoundrel before me”—But when thou seest, and what's more, when thou readest, forgive.—You will not let another year pass without our seeing you. M. Mohl gives us hopes, in his letter to Ju, that you won't, that you will come to England next year for many months, then, dearest friend, we will have a long talk out. If not, we really must come to Paris—and then I shall see you, and see the Deaconesses too, whom you so kindly wrote to me about, but of whom I have never heard half enough.…

The Bracebridges are at home—she rejoiced as much as we did over your event—Parthe is going at the end of November to do Officiating Verger to a friend of ours on a like event.—Her prospects are likewise so satisfactory, that I can rejoice and sympathize under any form she may choose to marry in. Otherwise I think that the day will come, when it will surprise us as much, to see people dressing up for a marriage, as it would to see them put on a fine coat for the Sacrament. Why should the Sacrament or Oath of Marriage be less sacred than any other?

The letter goes on to speak of a visit recently paid to Mrs. Archer Clive, well known in her day as the authoress of Poems by V. and of Paul Ferroll, a sensational novel of some force,—a lady whose powers of heart and mind were housed in an infirm body. Miss Nightingale admired her talents and her character, and valued her friendship.

But new friendships and varied interests did not bring satisfaction to Miss Nightingale. She was still constantly bent on pursuing a vocation of her own. Her parents caught eagerly at an opportunity which offered itself at the end of this year (1847), for giving, as they hoped, a new turn to her thoughts.

CHAPTER V
A WINTER IN ROME; AND AFTER
(1847–1849)

Six months of Rome and happiness.—Florence Nightingale (1848).

It was an event of some importance in the Nightingale family when Florence set out with Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, in the autumn of 1847, to spend the winter at Rome. The attraction to her was the society of Mrs. Bracebridge, the friend of whom she spoke as “her Ithuriel.” Moreover the mental unrest from which Florence constantly suffered at home was beginning to tell upon her health. “All that I want to do in life,” she wrote to her cousin Hilary, in explaining the motive of the tour, “depends upon my health, which, I am told, a winter in Rome will establish for ever.” She took the foreign tour as a tonic to enable her the better to fulfil her vocation. By her parents and her sister the tour was regarded as a tonic which might divert her from it. They hoped that foreign travel would distract her thoughts, and dispel what they perhaps considered morbid fancies. She would enjoy pleasant companionship. She would see famous and beautiful things. She might return converted to the more comfortable belief that her duty lay in accepting life as she found it. The point of view comes out clearly enough in a letter from her sister to Miss Bonham Carter:—

Embley, October [1847]. It is a very great pleasure to think of her with such a companion, one who, she says, lives always with the best part of her; one who has all the sense and discretion and the warm-hearted sympathy and the quick enjoyment and the taste and the affection which will most give her happiness; who will value her and take care of her, and do[70] her all the good mentally and bodily one can fancy. Yes, dear, God is very good to provide such a pleasant time, and it will rest her mind, I think, entirely from wearing thoughts that all men have at home when their duties weigh much on their consciences, while she will feel she is wasting nothing; for Mrs. Bracebridge has not been at all well and Flo will feel herself a comfort and a help to her, I hope, for I know she is a great one.… Though it is but for so short a time, yet it seems to me a great event, the solemn first launching her into life, and my heart is very full of many feelings, but yet the joy is greatest by an incalculable deal, for one does not see how harm can come to her. Yet when one loves a great deal, one cannot but be a little anxious.… It is so pretty to see Papa wandering over the big map of Rome remembering every corner, and Mama over Piranesi, and both over all the fair things that dwell there as tho' they had just left them.

And Florence herself did find comfort and pleasure in the tour; but it was destined not to divert, but to strengthen, her purpose, as also to lay a train of circumstances which was to lead her to the Crimea.

Florence and her companions reached Paris on October 27, took ship at Marseilles for Civita Vecchia, and stayed in Rome—in the Via S. Bastinello (No. 8)—from the beginning of November till March 29, 1848. Florence entered heartily into all the pursuits and occupations of elegant tourists in Rome. She studied the ruins; explored the catacombs; copied inscriptions; visited the churches and galleries; spent a morning in Gibson's studio and another in Overbeck's; collected plants in the Colosseum; rode in the Campagna, and bought brooches, mosaics, and Roman pearls. Her father had drawn out a programme of famous sights and pretty walks and drives; and the methodical Florence duly ticked them off on the list. She read her own thoughts and aspirations into many of the works of art. She greatly admired the Apollo Belvedere, seeing in it the type of triumphant Free Will. “We can never lose the recollection of our poor selves while we still do things with difficulty, while we are still uncertain whether we shall succeed or not. The triumph of success may be great and delightful, but the divine life—eternal life—is when to will is to do, when the will is the same thing as the act, and therefore the act is unconscious.” Of the Jupiter of the Capitol, again, she says: “Jupiter is that perfect grace in power where the divine Will, pure from exertion, speaks, and It is done.” But what chiefly interested her, what really impressed her mind and stimulated her imagination, was the genius of Michael Angelo:—

(To her Sister.) December 17 [1847]. Oh, my dearest, I have had such a day—my red Dominical, my Golden Letter, the 15th of December is its name, and of all my days in Rome this has been the most happy and glorious. Think of a day alone in the Sistine Chapel with Σ [Selina, Mrs. Bracebridge], quite alone, without custode, without visitors, looking up into that heaven of angels and prophets.… I did not think that I was looking at pictures, but straight into Heaven itself, and that the faults of the representation and the blackening of the colours were the dimness of my own earthly vision, which would only allow me to see obscurely, indistinctly, what was there in all its glory to be known even as I was known, if mortal eyes and understandings were cleared from the mists which we have wilfully thrown around them. There is Daniel, opening his windows and praying to the God of his Fathers three times a day in defiance of fear. You see that young and noble head like an eagle's, disdaining danger, those glorious eyes undazzled by all the honours of Babylon. Then comes Isaiah, but he is so divine that there is nothing but his own 53rd chapter will describe him. He is the Isaiah, the “grosse Unbekannte” of the Comfort ye, Comfort ye my people. I was rather startled at first by finding him so young, which was not my idea of him at all, while the others are old. But M. Angelo knew him better; it is the perpetual youth of inspiration, the vigour and freshness, ever new, ever living, of that eternal spring of thought which is typed under that youthful face. Genius has no age, while mind (Zechariah) has no youth. Next to Isaiah comes the Delphic Sibyl, the most beautiful, the most inspired of all the Sibyls here; but the distinction which M. Angelo has drawn even between her and the Prophets is so interesting. There is a security of inspiration about Isaiah; he is listening and he is speaking; “that which we hear we declare unto you.” There is an anxiety, an effort to hear even, about the Delphian; she is not quite sure; there is an uncertainty, a wistfulness in her eyes; she expects to be rewarded rather in another stage than this for her struggle to gain the prize of her high calling, to reach[72] to the Unknown that Isaiah knows already. There is no uncertainty as to her feeling of being called to hear the voice, but she fears that her earthly ears are heavy and gross, and corrupt the meaning of the heavenly words. I cannot tell you how affecting this anxious look of her far-reaching eyes is to the poor mortals standing on the pavement below, while the Prophets ride secure on the storm of Inspiration.… I feel these things to be part of the word of God, of the ladder to Heaven. The word of God is all by which He reveals His thought, all by which He makes a manifestation of Himself to men. It is not to be narrowed and confined to one book, or one nation; and no one can have seen the Sistine without feeling that he has been very near to God, that he will understand some of His words better for ever after; and that Michael Angelo, one of the greatest of the sons of men, when one looks at the dome of St. Peter's on the one hand and the prophets and martyrs on the other, has received as much of the breath of God, and has done as much to communicate it to men, as any Seer of old. He has performed that wonderful miracle of giving form to the breath of God, wonderful whether it is done by words, colours, or hard stones.…

The thoughts and emotions which have been suggested by the contemplation of the vault of the Sistine Chapel are countless. None are more enthusiastic than those which it inspired in Florence Nightingale, and few have been so discriminating. It is at once the privilege and a mark of consummate works of art to be capable of as many meanings as they may find of competent spectators. Each man brings to the study of them the insight of which he is capable; and each, perchance, finds in them some image of himself or of his own experience. “There are few moments, most probably,” Florence Nightingale went on to say, “which we shall carry with us through the gate of Death, few recollections which will stand the Eternal Light.” She felt as she came out of the Sistine Chapel that her first sight of Michael Angelo's stupendous work would be one of those few for her. We may surmise that the wistful uncertainty which she found in the face of the Delphic Sibyl had especially appealed to her in its truth to life as she had experienced it; conscious as she was of a call from God, conscious also as she could not but have been of great powers, and yet doubtful whether on this side of the gate of Death it would be given to her to interpret the Divine voice aright. She retained to the end of her life the same reverential feeling for Michael Angelo. She had photographs and engravings of the Sistine ceiling hanging in her rooms, and she sent some framed and inscribed photographs of the symbolical figures on the Medici tombs to hang at Embley on the little private staircase, where her father fell and died. Those at her home were bequeathed specifically in her Will.

The afternoon of the day on which the revelation of the Sistine Chapel came to her was spent by Florence and her friend in walking up the Monte Mario, to enjoy the famous view from the Villa Mellini, not then, as now, included within a fort:—

“We spent an exquisite half-hour,” she wrote, “mooning, or rather sunning about; the whole Campagna and city lying at our feet, the sea on one side like a golden laver below the declining sun, the windings of the Tiber and the hills of Lucretilis on the other, with Frascati, Tivoli, Tusculum on their cypress sides, for in that clear atmosphere you could see the very cypresses of Maecenas' villa at Tivoli; with long stripes of violet and pomegranate coloured light sweeping over the plain like waves; one stone pine upon the edge of our Mellini hill; and Rome, the fallen Babylon, like a dead city beneath, no sound of multitudes ascending, but the only life these great crimson lights and shadows (for here the shadow of a red light is violet) like the carnation-coloured wings of angels, themselves invisible, flapping over the plain and leaving this place behind them. We rushed down as fast as we could for the sun was setting, and we reached St. Peter's just as the doors were going to close. We had the great Church all to ourselves, the tomb of St. Peter wreathed with lights. It felt like the times when a Christian knight watched by his arms before some great enterprise at the Holy Sepulchre; and one shadowy white angel we could see through the windows over the great door; and do you know he quite made us startle as he stood there in the gloaming. Of course it was the marble statue on the facade; and there were workmen still laughing and talking at the extreme end, and their sounds, as they were repeated under the long vaults, were like the gibbering of devils, and their lanthorns, as they wavered along close to the ground, were like corpse-lights. I thought of St. Anthony and holy knights and their temptations. And at last the Sacristan took us out of that vast solemn dome through a tomb! and we glided into the silvery moonlight, and walked home over Ponte St. Angelo, where I made a little[74] invocation to St. Michael to help me to thank; for why the Protestants should shut themselves out, in solitary pride, from the Communion of Saints in heaven and in earth, I never could understand. And so ended this glorious day.”

The obsession of Rome, which sooner or later comes upon every intelligent visitor to the Eternal City, dated in the case of Florence Nightingale from this golden-letter day. She surmounted the sense of confusion which sometimes oppresses the traveller. “I do not feel,” she wrote, “though Pagan in the morning, Jew in the afternoon, and Christian in the evening, anything but a unity of interest in all these representations. To know God we must study Him as much in the Pagan and Jewish dispensations as in the Christian (though that is the last and most perfect manifestation), and this gives unity to the whole—one continuous thread of interest to all these pearls.”

II

The politics of modern Italy interested her no less than the ruins of ancient Rome or the monuments of mediæval art. She had met many Italian refugees, both at Geneva and in the salon of Madame Mohl in Paris, and was a whole-hearted enthusiast in the cause of Italian freedom. Her present visit to Rome synchronized with that curious and short-lived episode in the struggle during which Pio Nono was playing “the ineffectual tragedy of Liberal Catholicism.” All Rome seemed seized with sympathy for the cities beyond the Papal states, which were fighting for liberty, and within the states themselves Pio Nono's offerings of mild benevolence sufficed to call forth “floods of ecstatic, demonstrative Italian humanity, torchlight processions, and crowds kneeling at his feet.”[38] Miss Nightingale saw the Roman nobles, Prince Corsini, Prince Gaetano, and others, presiding at “patriotic altars,” which had been set up in the public squares for the receipt of gifts in money and in jewellery. She heard the famous Father Gavazzi preach the crusade in the Colosseum. She cheered as the Tricolor of Italy was hoisted on the Capitol. “I certainly was born,” she wrote to her cousin Hilary, “to be a tag-rag-and-bob-tail, for when I hear of a popular demonstration, I am nothing better than a ragamuffin.” She heard the rumble of a distant drum, and rushed up for Mr. Bracebridge, and he and she broke their own windows because they were not illuminated; stayed to see the torchlight procession of patriots singing the hymn to Pio Nono, and were rewarded by the crowd crying “God save the Queen,” as they passed the English “milord” and his companion. “Very touching,” she said; “though royalty was the very last thing I was thinking of”; for at this time, as she often avowed in her letters, her sympathies were Republican. “When this memorable year began with all its revolutions,” she wrote later to Madame Mohl, after disillusion had come (June 27), “I thought that it was the Kingdom of Heaven coming under the fate of a Republic. But alas! things have shown that more of us must slowly ripen to angels here, before the régime of the angels, i.e. the Kingdom of Heaven, will begin.” But for the moment everything seemed radiant. She recorded with pleasure in February that a deputation of Romans had gone up to the Pope to express their “complete confidence in him.” In her note-books she collected particulars of his life and character; and when in March he granted what can only be called a sort of a Constitution, she wrote to Madame Mohl: “My dear Santo Padre seems doing very well. He has given up his Temporal Power. No man took it from him; he laid it down of himself. I think that he will reign in history as the only prince who ever did, and that his character is nearer Christ's than any I ever heard of.” History will hardly confirm this saying; but if Miss Nightingale's words seem ill-balanced in the light of subsequent events, let it be remembered that, as Mr. Trevelyan says, “the cult of Pio Nono was for some months the religion of Italy, and of Liberals and exiles all over the world. Even Garibaldi in Monte Video, and Mazzini in London, shared the enthusiasm of the hour.” A year later, when the Roman Republic had been declared and the Pope had fled, and the French troops besieged Rome on his behalf, Miss Nightingale had only pity for Pio Nono; her anger she reserved for the French “cannibals,” for the one Republic that was devouring another. “I must exhale my rage and indignation,” she wrote in a diary (June 30, 1849), “before I have lost all notions of absolute right and wrong. It makes my heart bleed that the French nation, the nation above all others capable of an ideal, of aspiring after the abstract right, should have lent itself to such a brutal crime against its own brother—one may say its own offspring, for the Roman Republic sprang from the French; it is purest cannibalism; this breaks my heart. When I think of that afternoon at Villa Mellini (now occupied by a French general), of Rome, bathed in her crimson and purple shadows, lying at our feet, and St. Michael spreading his wings over all—the Angel of Regeneration as we thought him then—my eyes fill with tears. But he will be the Angel of Regeneration yet.” The French, she said, might reduce the city and occupy it; but the heroic defence of the Republic “will have raised the Romans in the moral scale, and in their own esteem.” They would never sink back to what they had been. Sooner or later, Rome would be free. She was especially indignant at the talk which she heard on all sides in cultivated society at home about the “vandalism” of the Romans in exposing their precious monuments of art to assault. She loved those monuments, as we have seen; but if the defence of Rome against the French required it, she would have been ready to see them all levelled to the ground. “They must carry out their defence to the last,” she cried. “I should like to see them fight the streets, inch by inch, till the last man dies at his barricade, till St. Peter's is level with the ground, till the Vatican is blown into the air. Then would this be the last of such brutal, not house-breakings, but city-breakings; then, and not till then, would Europe do justice to France as a thief and a murderer, and a similar crime be rendered impossible for all ages. If I were in Rome, I should be the first to fire the Sistine, turning my head aside, and Michael Angelo would cry, ‘Well done,’ as he saw his work destroyed.” It was not only in relation to the restraints of conventional domesticity that Florence Nightingale was a rebel.

III

During her own stay in Rome, however, there was something which interested her more than Roman politics or Roman monuments. It was the philanthropic work of a Convent School. Every visitor to Rome knows the Trinità de' Monti. The flight of steps between the church and the Piazza di Spagna is celebrated alike for its own beauty and for the flower-girls and women in peasant-costume who frequent it. The church itself contains many fine works of art, and the choral service is one of the attractions of ecclesiastical Rome. The neighbourhood is rich in artistic and literary associations. Florence Nightingale had sympathetic eyes and ears for all these things; but what attracted her most was the convent attached to the church, with its school for girls, and (in another part of the city) its orphanage. She was broad-minded, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, in relation to church creeds. It was by works, not faith, or at any rate by faith issuing in works, that she weighed the churches. It was characteristic of the thoroughness of her mental character that during this sojourn in Rome she made a methodical study of Roman doctrine and ritual. Among her papers and note-books belonging to this time, there are careful analyses of the theory of Indulgence, of the Real Presence, of the Rosary, and so forth. She made, too, a careful collation of the Latin Breviary with the English Prayer-Book. She summed up her comparative study of the churches in this generalization: “The great merit of the Catholic Church: its assertion of the truth that God still inspires mankind as much as ever. Its great fault: its limiting this inspiration to itself. The great merit of Protestantism: its proclamation of freedom of conscience within the limits of the Scriptures. Its great fault: its erection of the Bible into a master of the soul.” Her deep sense of the self-responsibility of every human soul kept her free from any inclination to Roman doctrine; but she was profoundly impressed by the practical beneficence of Roman sisterhoods. An example of such beneficence she found in the school and orphanage of the Dames du Sacré Cœur. She had picked up a poor girl called Felicetta Sensi, and procured her admission as a free boarder, paying for her care and education for many years. She formed a warm attachment to the Lady Superior, the Madre Sta. Colomba. She studied the organization, rules, and methods of the large school, and for ten days she went into Retreat in the Convent.[39] Her intercourse with the Madre Sta. Colomba, of whose talk and spiritual experiences she made full and detailed notes, made a very deep impression on her mind. She studied rules and organization, but, as in all her studies, she was seeking a motive, as well as, and indeed more than, a method. Many years later, a friend wrote to her: “It seems to me that the greatest want among nurses is devotion. I use the word in a very wide sense, meaning that state of mind in which the current of desire is flowing towards one high end. This does not presuppose knowledge, but it very soon attains it.”[40] This was a profound conviction of her own, often expressed, as we shall hear, in her Addresses and Letters of Exhortation in later years. What she set herself to study at the Trinità de' Monti was the secret of devotion. She made notes of the Lady Superior's exhortations; of the spiritual exercises which were enjoined upon novices; of the forms and discipline of self-examination. She sought to extract the secret, and to apply it to the inculcation of the highest kind of service to man as the service of God. For many years the thought in her mind was to be the foundation of some distinctive order or sisterhood; and though in the end she came to be glad that she had not done this, she never abandoned the high ideal which was behind her thought. Nor, though in some ways and in some cases she came to be disillusioned about nursing sisterhoods, did she ever cease to speak with admiration of what she had seen and learnt in some of them. She thought more often, and with more affectionate remembrance, about the spirit of the best Catholic sisterhoods than of Kaiserswerth, or indeed of anything else in her professional experience.

In such studies upon the Trinità de' Monti in the winter of 1847–48, she was taken, as she said in a note of self-examination, out of all interests that fostered her “vanity”; it was her “happiest New Year.” “The most entire and unbroken freedom from dreaming I ever had,” she wrote at a later time. “Oh, how happy I was!” And so again, looking back after twenty years, she wrote: “I never enjoyed any time in my life so much as my time at Rome.”[41]

IV

Another incident of Miss Nightingale's sojourn in Rome was destined, though she knew it not at the time, to have a far-reaching influence upon her career. Among the English visitors who spent the winter of 1847–48 in Rome were Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert. Mr. Herbert had already been Secretary at War under Peel, a post to which he was afterwards to return under Aberdeen. The resignation of Peel's Cabinet in 1846 released Mr. Herbert from official work. Later in the year he married a lady with whom he had been long acquainted, Elizabeth à Court, daughter of General Charles Ashe à Court; and in the following year he and his wife set out for a long Continental tour. Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge were friends of the Herberts, and thus Florence Nightingale made their acquaintance in Rome. In her retrospect she specially recalled the beginning there of her friendship with Sidney Herbert “under the dear Bracebridges' wing.” Compatriots who meet in this way in any foreign resort are apt to see a good deal of each other, and from this winter dates the beginning of a friendship which was to be a governing factor in the life of Florence Nightingale. Sidney Herbert, when they met in galleries or at soirées, or rode together in the Campagna, must have been struck by Miss Nightingale's marked abilities, and for Mrs. Herbert she formed an affectionate attachment. She noted “the great kindness, the desire of love, the magnanimous generosity” of her new friend. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert saw much of Archdeacon Manning (the future cardinal), who was also spending the winter in Rome, and Miss Nightingale was on friendly terms with him.[42] This also was an acquaintance which had some influence on her future career. Sidney Herbert, aided by the ready sympathy of his wife, was devoting much thought, now liberated from official duties, to schemes of benevolence among the poor on his estates. “He felt strongly the disadvantage at which the poor were placed in being compelled after illness, and perhaps after undergoing painful operations, to return in the earliest stage of convalescence, without rest or change, to their accustomed labour.”[43] He was full of a scheme for a Convalescent Home and Cottage Hospital (such as is now no rarity, but was then almost unknown), and it can be imagined with what zest Miss Nightingale shared his thoughts. One of the first things which she records in her diary after return from the Continent is “an expedition with Mrs. Sidney Herbert to set up her Convalescent Home at Charmouth”; but this was only a passing incident, and return to the habitual home life, after the distraction of foreign travel, left her no more contented than before.

On her return to London in the early summer of 1848 she sent her friends occasionally the talk of the town:—

(To Madame Mohl.) July 26 [1848]. In London there have been the usual amount of Charity Balls, Charity Concerts, Charity Bazaars, whereby people bamboozle their consciences and shut their eyes. Nevertheless there does not seem the slightest prospect of a revolution here. Why, would be hard to say, as England is surely the country where luxury has reached its height and poverty its depth. Perhaps it is our Poor Law, perhaps the strength of our Middle Class, perhaps a greater degree of sympathy between the rich and poor, which is the conservative principle. Lord Ashley had a Chartist deputation with him the other day, who stayed to tea and talked with him for five hours. “That a man should ride in a carriage and have twenty thousand a year is contrary to the laws of Nature,” said their leader, and slapped his leg. “I could show you, if you would go with me to-night,” said Lord Ashley, “people who would say to you,[81] that a man should go in broadcloth and wear a shirt-pin (pointing to the Chartist's shirt) is contrary to the laws of Nature.” The Chartist was silent. “And it was the only thing I said,” says Lord Ashley, “after arguing with them for five hours which made the least impression.”

Her acquaintance with Lord Ashley (afterwards Lord Shaftesbury) brought her in touch with Ragged School work. But society grew more and more distasteful to Miss Nightingale. She explained the reasons in a letter to her “Aunt Hannah.” Why could she not smile and be gay, while yet biding her time and not forsaking her ultimate ideals? It was, she said, because she “hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of her sin.” There is something obviously morbid in such words, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, if there were good reason for doing so, from her letters, diaries, and note-books. The sins of which she most often convicted herself were “hypocrisy” and “vanity.” She prayed to be delivered from “the desire of producing an effect.” That was the “vanity”; and it was “hypocrisy,” because she was playing a part, responding to friends' conception of her, though all the while her heart was really set on other things, and her true life was being lived elsewhere. The morbidness was a symptom of a mind at war with its surroundings. Then again the kind “Aunt” reminded her, in the spirit of George Herbert, that anything and everything may be done “to the glory of God.” But Miss Nightingale at this time was deep in the study of political economy; and “can it be to the glory of God,” she asked, “when there is so much misery among the poor, which we might be curing instead of living in luxury?”

V

In the autumn of 1848 an opportunity occurred which promised the realization of the dearest wish of her heart, but once more she was doomed to disappointment. Her mother and sister had been advised to go to Carlsbad for the cure. M. and Madame Mohl were to be at Frankfurt, and they were all to meet in that city. Frankfurt is near to Kaiserswerth, and Florence was to be allowed to go there. But at the very moment disturbances broke out in Frankfurt, and the whole plan was abandoned. “I am not going to consign to paper for your benefit,” she wrote to Madame Mohl (October 1848), “all the cursings and swearings which relieved my disappointed feelings; for oh! what a plan of plans I had made out for myself! All that I most wanted to do at Kaiserswerth, Brussels, and Co., lay for the first time within reach of my mouth, and the ripe plum has dropped.” Florence accompanied her mother to the cure at Malvern instead, where, with many prayers for humility under the will of God, she lived for several weeks upon the dry and bitter fruit of disappointment. During the winter of 1848–49 Miss Nightingale saw something of M. Guizot and his family. The Minister had escaped to London after the fall of Louis Philippe, and was living in a modest house in Brompton. He found in Miss Nightingale “a brave and sympathetic soul, for whom great thoughts and great devotions had a serious attraction.”[44]

During the next year she found some congenial work in London. She inspected hospitals. She worked in Ragged Schools. She spoke of her “little thieves at Westminster” as her “greatest joy in London.” But these unconventional attractions of the London season set her all the more against the life of country houses. “Ought not one's externals,” she wrote in her diary (July 2, 1849), “to be as nearly as possible an incarnation of what life really is? Life is not a green pasture and a still water, as our homes make it. Life is to some a forty days' fasting, moral or physical, in the wilderness; to some it is a fainting under the carrying of the crop; to some it is a crucifixion; to all, a struggle for truth, for safety. Life is seen in a much truer form in London than in the country. In an English country place everything that is painful is so carefully removed out of sight, behind those fine trees, to a village three miles off. In London, at all events if you open your eyes, you cannot help seeing in the next street that life is not as it has been made to you. You cannot get out of a carriage at a party without seeing what is in the faces making the lane on either side, and without feeling tempted to rush back and say, ‘Those are my brothers and sisters.’” She longed to rush back, to be able to go out freely into the slums, to comfort some old woman who was dying unattended, or rescue some child who was going astray untaught. But the proprieties prevented. “It would never do,” she was told, “for a young woman in her station in life to go out in London without a servant.” In the autumn of 1849 the distraction of another foreign tour was offered. Her parents and her sister hoped once more that Florence would return a different and a more comfortable woman. Those with whom we are cast into the nearest intimacy sometimes understand us least.

CHAPTER VI
FOREIGN TRAVEL: EGYPT AND GREECE
(1849–1850)

When o'er the world we range
'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change.

Horace.

In the autumn of 1849 Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, who were to spend some months in the East, again proposed that Miss Nightingale should travel with them, and again the offer was gladly accepted. Her sister was delighted. The expedition to Rome had not done what was hoped, but here was a second chance. The sister reported to her friends that “Flo had taken tea with the Bunsens to receive the dernier mot on Egyptology,” and that she was going out “laden with learned books.” Perhaps Florence would become absorbed in such studies, and adopt a life of gracefully learned leisure. The literary temptation did, it is true, assail Florence, but she put it behind her.

The party started in October, bound for Egypt, where the winter was to be spent. Thence they were to proceed to Athens, where Mr. Bracebridge had property. The return journey in the summer of 1850 was to be made through Germany, and Kaiserswerth was to be visited. Florence, we may surmise, looked forward most to the last stage in the journey. On November 18 the travellers landed at Alexandria. On the 27th they reached Cairo. On December 4 they started in a dahabiah for the Nile voyage. The boat was christened in honour of Florence's sister. “My work,” she wrote, “is making the pennant, blue bunting with swallow tail, a Latin red cross upon it, and ΠΑΡΘΕΝΟΠΗ in white tape. It has taken all my tape, and a vast amount of stitches, but it will be the finest pennant on the river, and my petticoats will joyfully acknowledge the tribute to sisterly affection, for sisterly affection in tape in Lower Egypt, let me observe, is worth having.” They went up the river as far as Ipsambul (Abu-Simbel), a little below Wady Halfy; on the return journey they spent several days at Thebes. The letters which Florence sent home show that Egypt appealed strongly to her imagination. What struck her most was the solemnity of the country. “Nothing ever laughs or plays. Everything is grown up and grown old.” The letters are full too of Egyptology; for she had made tables of dynasties, copied plans of temples, and analysed the leading ideas in Egyptian mythology as expounded by the best writers of the time:—

Abu-Simbel, January 17 [1850].… I passed through other halls, till at last I found myself in a chamber in the rock, where sat, in the silence of an eternal night, four figures against the further end. I could see nothing more; yet I did not feel afraid as I did at Karnak, though I was quite alone in these subterranean halls; for the sublime expression of that judge of the dead had looked down on me, the incarnation of the goodness of the deity, as Osiris is; and I thought how beautiful the idea which placed him in the foremost hall, and then led the worshipper gradually on to the more awful attributes of the deity; for here, as I could dimly see through the darkness, sat the creative power of the mind—Neph, “the intellect”; Amun, “the concealed god”; Phthah, “the creator of the visible world”; and Ra, “the sustainer,” Ra, “the sun” to whom the temple is dedicated.… I turned to go out, and saw at the further end the golden sand glittering in the sunshine outside the top of the door; and the long sand-hill, sloping down from it to the feet of the innermost Osirides, which are left quite free, all but their pedestals, looked like the waves of time, gradually flowing in and covering up these imperishable genii, who have seen three thousand years pass over their heads and heed them not. In the holiest place, there where no sound ever reaches, it is as if you felt the sensible progress of time, not by the tick of a clock, as we measure time, but by some spiritual pulse which marks to you its onward march, not by[86] its second, nor its minute, nor its hour-hand, but by its century hand. I thought of the worshippers of three thousand years ago; how they by this time have reached the goal of spiritual ambition, have brought all their thoughts to serve God or the ideal of goodness; how we stand there with the same goal before us, only as distant as the star, which, a little later, I saw rising exactly over that same sand-hill in the centre of the top of the doorway, but as sure and fixed; how to them all other thoughts are now as nothing, and the ideal we all pursue of happiness is won; not because they have not probably sufferings, like ours, but because they no longer suggest any other thought but of doing God's will, which is happiness. I thought, too, three thousand years hence, we might perhaps have attained—and others would stand here, and still those old gods would be sitting in the eternal twilight.…

Thebes, February 10 [1850].… The Valley of the Kings seems, though within a mile of Thebes, as if one had arrived at the mountains of Kaf, beyond which are only “creatures unknown to any but God,”—so deep are the ravines, so high and blue the sky, so absolutely solitary and unearthly, so utterly uninhabitable the place. One look at that valley would give you more idea of the supernatural, the gate of Hades, than all the descriptions, sacred or profane. What a moment it is, the entering that valley, where in those rocky caverns, the vastness and the gloomy darkness of which are equally awful, the kings of the earth lie, each in his huge sarcophagus, with the bodies of his chiefs, each in their chamber, about him; and where, about this time, they are to return, to find their bodies and resume their abode on earth,—if purified by their three thousand years of probation, in a higher and better state; if degraded, in a lower. I thought I met them at every turn in those long subterraneous galleries,—saw their shades rising from their shattered sarcophagi, and advancing once more towards the light of day, which shone like a star, so distant and so faint, at the end of that opening; the dead were stirred up, the chief ones of the earth.… Well, these Pharaohs are perhaps now here, again in the body, their three thousand years having just elapsed to some of them,—that is, if they have philosophized sincerely, or, together with philosophy, have “loved beautiful forms.” … And if I were a Pharaoh now, I would choose the Arab form, and come back to help these poor people; and I am going to-morrow to a tomb of Rameses, B.C. 1150, to meet him and tell him so.…

It was no wonder that Miss Nightingale pitied the poor people; for the Egypt in which she travelled was as Mehemet Ali, the Lion of the Levant, had left it. She saw girls sold in the open slave market “at from £2 to £9 a head.” She heard how justice was sold to the highest bidder; and “everybody,” she noted, “seems to bastinado everybody else.” “Every man,” she noted further, “is a conscript for the army, and mothers put out their children's right eye to save them from conscription, till Mehemet Ali, who was too clever for them, had a one-eyed regiment, who carried the musket on the left shoulder.” Miss Nightingale was fond of escaping from the dahabiah in order to wander about the desert, “poking my own nose,” as she wrote home, “into all the villages,” and seeing for herself how “these poor people” lived. “They call me ‘the wild ass of the wilderness, snuffing up the wind,’ because I am so fond of getting away.” Egyptian impressions stayed long in her memory, and they recurred to her thirty years later in connection with her Indian studies.[45] As on her earlier visit to Rome, so now in Egypt she utilized all such opportunities as came in her way for studying the work of religious Sisterhoods. At Alexandria she passed her days, she wrote, “much to my satisfaction, as I had travelled with two Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul from Paris to Auxerre, who gave me an introduction to the Sisters here; and I have spent a great deal of time with them in their beautiful schools and Miséricorde. There are only 19 of them, but they seem to do the work of 90.”

II

In April 1850 Miss Nightingale went with her friends to Athens. Their house was in Eucharis Street, and Florence “slept in the library, which opens on to a terrace looking upon the back of the Acropolis.” She had little taste for the topographical research and nice distinctions between different masters of sculpture which absorb the interest of many modern travellers and students. She was interested in broader speculations. The soul of a people, as expressed in their art, was the object to which she directed her observation, and around which she loved to let her imagination play. In her note-books and letters she discusses the spiritual conceptions embodied in the worship of the several Greek gods; she traces the symbols of Greek mythology to their sources in Greek scenery; she pictures the genius of Aeschylus (her favourite tragedian, preferred by her even to Shakespeare) or of Sophocles developing in relation to local conditions and surroundings. Of the statues, the pensive beauty of the sepulchral bas-reliefs most arrested her attention; and in architecture, she loved most the Doric, for its severity, its simplicity, its perfection of proportion, its image of the ideal republic:—

Only a republican could have conceived it, and it is sin for any other government to imitate it. Look at each column—man, I mean—rearing its noble head; yet none has a separate base. Each man stands upon the common base of his country. Look at the simplicity of the fluting of the capital. No man thinks of his own adornment, but only of the glory of the whole. The fluting does not look like its ornament, but its drapery. I do love the old Doric as if it was a person. Then comes the Ionic, light and elegant and airy, it is true, like the Attic wit, but somewhat luscious to the taste; it soon palls; the fluting is too laboured, too semicircular, like the people sitting in a semi-circle to hear the wit of Aristophanes; it does not look as if it belonged to the column; and that ridge between the flutes, what is it doing there? It looks like the interval while the next interlocutor is thinking of a repartee. Then that rich beading round the base, like one of Euripides' choruses which have nothing to do with the piece. Give me the Ionic to amuse me, but the Doric to interest me. The Corinthian is like the worship of Dionysus, like the illustration of Nature by Art—a bad conjunction, I think, which in any other hands would become Art run mad, but modified by the exquisite artistic perceptions of the Greeks is exquisitely beautiful, but it is not architecture. The Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian are the ethical, the poetical, and the aesthetic views of life. But look at the workmanship of these things. How mathematically exact it is—the very poetry of number.

It was characteristic of the philosophical bent of her mind that she sought to refer the charm of the scenery to some general law:—

Athens, June 8. I have been taking some lovely rides with Mr. Hill on Hymettus, along the Daphne road, and to Karà. How lovely the scenery is, would be difficult to describe, and why it is so lovely. I begin to think that it is the proportion, and that there must be proportion in the things of Nature as of Art. I am talking nonsense, I believe, but nobody minds me, you know. In the valleys of Switzerland the height is too great for the width, and it looks like a bottle. In the valleys of Egypt the width is too great for the height, and it looks like a tray. For this reason clouds are provided in Switzerland and Scotland; the height would become intolerably out of proportion unless it were covered in at the top. For this reason clear sky is in Egypt, or you would feel in a shelf. But here, where the clear sky is meant, they say, to be perpetual (tho' I cannot say I have seen much of it since I came), the proportion observed has been perfect, the exact curve is always there, the exact slope which you want; and if a line were to change its place, you feel the effect would be spoilt. You feel towards it as to an architectural building. I believe that in this lies the great peculiarity of the Athenian views. Otherwise, for colouring, I must declare I have seen nothing like the evenings of the Campagna.

Of the Parthenon by moonlight she wrote that it was “impossible that earth or heaven could produce anything more beautiful.” In other letters she dwells on the beauty of the view from Lycabettus, and the glory of the sunset from Hymettus. One day upon the Acropolis she found some boys with a baby owl that had just fallen from its nest in the Parthenon. She bought it from them and kept it. It used to travel in her pocket, and lived at Embley.

III

Public affairs in Greece interested her also. She had arrived in Greek waters at the height of the “Pacifico crisis.” There had been a rupture between England and Greece, which threatened also the relations between England and France, and which convulsed political parties at Westminster, over the claims of Mr. Finlay, the historian of modern Greece, and Don Pacifico, a native of Gibraltar. Lord Palmerston had ordered the Mediterranean Fleet to the Peiraeus to enforce the British claims, and Miss Nightingale was sitting beside Mr. Wyse, the British Minister at Athens, at dinner on board H.M.S. Howe, when the submission of the Greek Government was brought to him. Her home letters throw much light on the ins and outs of this affair, which, however, is now only remembered as the occasion of Lord Palmerston's vindication in the House of Commons with its famous peroration about Civis Romanus sum. Miss Nightingale now, as earlier, was a strong Palmerstonian. “The friends of Broadlands,” she wrote to her parents, “need never have been less uneasy for his reputation”; and if parliamentary success be a sufficient test, she was entirely right. She found herself again in the thick of political discussion on leaving Greek waters. Her party sailed from Athens on June 17, and went to Trieste by Corfu—“that fairy island,” she wrote, “where every flower grows twice as big as it does anywhere else, and where no frost can touch the olive and the pomegranate.” She and her parents were acquainted with Sir Henry Ward, then Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. Sir Henry, who had been an active Liberal at home, had felt himself obliged to adopt sternly repressive measures in the islands. Miss Nightingale was opposed to his policy, as also to the British occupation. He invited her and her friends to the Palace. She went to proffer excuses. “He came out, said that I had often called him ‘Tyrant,’ and took me in his arms like a father, and stood over me in the character of Tyrant (he said) till I had written a letter compelling them all to come, which he then sealed and I sent. So the whole posse comitatus of us spent the day there, they sending the carriage for us, and I am really glad to have seen what is my idea of Eastern luxury.” The tyrant placed his accuser next to him at dinner, deplored his “false position,” and so forth, and they made some sort of peace; though not perhaps till Miss Nightingale had sought to bring him to a conviction of sin for his executions and arbitrary arrests, for she was armed, as her letters show, now as ever, with all the facts and figures marshalled in Blue-book precision.

IV

Her mind was interested in all these things, but her heart was elsewhere. “Wherever thou art,” said a famous statesman, “it is with the poor that thou should'st live.” It was so with Florence Nightingale's inmost thoughts. Her greatest pleasure in Athens was found in the society of the American missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Hill, who conducted a school and orphanage. Of Mrs. Hill she wrote, “From heaven she comes, in heaven she lives.” In charge of the mission school was a Greek refugee from Crete, Elizabeth Kontaxaki, and with her too Florence Nightingale formed a warm friendship. Elizabeth had lived an adventurous life before she found security at Athens. Her father had fallen by a Turkish bullet. Her mother had made an heroic escape from a Turkish captor, and the first years of the child's life were spent in the fastnesses of Mount Ida. “Alas,” wrote Miss Nightingale, “how worthless my life seems to me by the side of these women.” A mood of great dejection appears in her diary of this time, to which an attack of low-fever no doubt contributed. She could not find satisfaction in the interests of foreign travel. She was tortured by unsatisfied longings which could find outlet only in a world of dreams. An entry in her diary for June 7 is in these words: “Grotto of the Eumenides. Will this Fury go on increasing till by degrees my mind is more and more taken off the outer world with all its claims, and I am no longer able to command my attention at all?”

Miss Nightingale and her friends landed at Trieste at the end of June, and thence made their way to Dresden and Berlin. The pictures which most impressed her were Raphael's “Sistine Madonna” and the “Reading Magdalen,” then attributed to Correggio. A year later her mother and sister were at Dresden, and she enjoined them, above all things, to see “the Magdalen, the queen of pictures.” “How I feel that picture now,” she wrote to them (August 26, 1851), “dark wood behind, sharp stones in front, nothing to look back upon, nothing to look forward to, clinging to the present as she does to the book, which beams bright light upon me. Oh what a history that picture contains in its little canvass; and how well it hangs near that glorious Sistine Virgin. All that woman might be, all that she will be, near what she is; for it is not a Magdalen, in the common sense of the word, or rather it is in the common sense of what woman commonly is—not what we mean by a Magdalen.” At Dresden Miss Nightingale was still in much dejection. “I have never felt so bad,” she wrote (July 7); “the habit of living not in the present but in a future of dreams is gradually spreading over my whole existence. It is rapidly approaching the state of madness when dreams become realities.” And now when the goal of Kaiserswerth was near, she felt almost unmanned; almost inclined to turn back and follow another path. “It seemed to me now (July 10) as if quiet, with somebody to look for my coming back, was all I wanted.” But this was only a moment of passing weakness. At Berlin her spirits revived; for her vital interests were satisfied, and she spent some days in inspecting the hospitals and other benevolent institutions. On July 31 she reached Kaiserswerth. “I could hardly believe I was there,” she wrote in her diary. “With the feeling with which a pilgrim first looks on the Kedron, I saw the Rhine, dearer to me than the Nile.” She stayed a fortnight with the Pastor and his wife and the Deaconesses, studying their institutions. “Left Kaiserswerth,” says the diary (August 13), “feeling so brave as if nothing could ever vex me again.”[46] She rejoined her friends at Düsseldorf. “They stayed at Ghent actually for me to finish my MS.” (August 17). “Finished my MS. They read it. Mr. Bracebridge corrected it and sent it off” (August 19). Next day they returned to England. The manuscript was of the pamphlet describing “The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine,” which was issued anonymously soon after Miss Nightingale's return.[47] Some notice of the pamphlet will be found in a later chapter in connection with her longer sojourn at Kaiserswerth in 1851. It was printed by the inmates of the Ragged School at Westminster in which she was interested. She described in it the work of the Deaconesses, and ended with an appeal to Englishwomen to go and do likewise. The fire burnt within her, and she returned home more than ever resolved to consecrate her life to the service of the sick and sorrowful.

V

Foreign travel, it will thus be seen, had worked no such cure, had created no such diversion, as her family desired. Their hope, even their expectation, was not unreasonable. Florence Nightingale was a woman of learning, and her foreign travels had stimulated her alike to research and to imaginative thought. At home, too, during all the years of restless and unsatisfied yearning for some other life, she had been a diligent reader and student. She had a real gift for literary expression, as her letters may already have indicated, and as her later writings were to prove more decisively. She had, moreover, the instinct for self-expression. She was a constant letter-writer and note-taker. She communed with herself not only in speechless thought, but in written memoranda. Had another impulse not been stronger within her, she might easily have become a literary woman of some distinction. But though she was fond of writing for her own satisfaction, she had a profound distrust of it as a substitute for action. Like one of George Eliot's heroines, “she did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action.” “You ask me,” she had written to Miss Clarke in 1844, “why I do not write something. I think what is not of the first class had better not exist at all; and besides I had so much rather live than write; writing is only a supplement for living. Would you have one go away and ‘give utterance to one's feelings’ in a poem to appear (price 2 guineas) in the Belle Assemblée? I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results. Do you think a babe would ever learn to walk if it were to talk about its living in such ‘strange times,’ ‘I must learn to use my legs,’ and so on? Or do you think anybody ever did anything, who did not go to it with a directness of purpose, which prevented him from frittering away his impressions in words?” She was of Ibsen's persuasion:—

What is Life? a fighting
In heart and in brain with trolls.
Poetry? that means writing
Doomsday-accounts of our souls.[48]

She held in great suspicion and dislike what she called the “artist-like way of looking upon life.” It reduces all religions, she said, and most inward and spiritual feelings “into a sort of magic-lantern, with which to make play for the amusement of the company.” Her mother used to praise her “beautiful letters,” was proud of the “European reputation” she had won among learned men, and wanted to know why she could not be happy in cultivating at home the gifts which God had given her. To Florence Nightingale these things were not gifts to be cultivated, but rather temptations to be subdued. She read with some attention in 1846 a book called Passages from the Life of a Daughter at Home, a religious work containing counsels of submission for women dissatisfied with their home life. “Piling up miscellaneous instruction for oneself,” she wrote in one place in the margin; “the most unsatisfactory of all pursuits!” She strove to say to God, as she wrote in another place, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord! not Behold the handmaid of correspondence, or of music, or of metaphysics!” “That power of always writing a good letter whenever one likes,” she said in one of her pages of self-examination, “is a great temptation”—a temptation, if such it be, to which, it must be confessed, she continually succumbed. But she wished to win no repute from her fall. In 1854 her sister printed the “beautiful letters” from Egypt,[49] and issued a few copies for private circulation. Florence was not pleased, but acquiesced, and corrected the proofs.

Any dreams, then, which she may have harboured of literary distinction, she had put resolutely away from her. “Oh God,” she had written in her diary at Cairo, “thou puttest into my heart this great desire to devote myself to the sick and sorrowful. I offer it to thee. Do with it what is for thy service.” But there was still one other temptation to be subdued.

CHAPTER VII
THE SINGLE LIFE

The craving for sympathy, which exists between two who are to form one indivisible and perfect whole, is in most cases between man and woman, in some between man and God. This the Roman Catholics have understood and expressed under the simile, Christ the bridegroom, the Nun married to Him, the Monk married to the Church; or as St. Francis to poverty, or as St. Ignatius Loyola to the divine mistress of his thoughts, the Virgin. This sort of tie between man and God seems alone able to fill the want of the other, the permanent exclusive tie between the one man and the one woman.—Florence Nightingale: Suggestions for Thought.

“I had three paths among which to choose,” wrote Miss Nightingale in a diary of 1850: “I might have been a literary woman, or a married woman, or a Hospital Sister.” We have seen how she turned away from the first path. Why did she reject the second?

“Our dear Flo,” wrote Mrs. Bracebridge to Miss Clarke in 1844, “has just recovered from a severe cold, but I hear nothing of what I long for, i.e. some noble-hearted, true man, one who can love her as she deserves to be loved, prepared to take her to a house of her own.” And three years later another friend, Fanny Allen, in describing a visit to Embley, said of Florence: “What a wife she would make for a man worthy of her! but I am not sure I yet know the mate fit for her.” The two Nightingale girls, she surmised, would experience a “difficulty in finding any one they would like well enough to forsake such a home.”[50] In the case of Florence, the position was ill understood by outsiders. To her the home was not a happy garden which she would be very reluctant to forsake, but rather a gilded cage from which she eagerly sought a way of escape. To us who have the means of knowing her inmost thoughts and feelings, the question thus presents itself in another light than that in which it appeared to her friends at the time. She craved for a larger, fuller life than she could find at home. Why could she not, or why did she not, seek it in marriage? It is love that sometimes “frees the imprisoned spirit,” that enables it to find and to express itself. That Miss Nightingale remained single was not the result of lack of opportunity to marry. The reason is to be found elsewhere—in feelings, thoughts, and ideals, in reasoned convictions and aspirations, which, if I can present them aright, will illuminate her character and her career.

In 1873 Miss Nightingale, like the rest of the world, was reading Middlemarch, and a paper which she wrote in that year contained some notice of George Eliot's heroine.[51] “A novel of genius has appeared. Its writer once put before the world (in a work of fiction too), certainly the most living, probably the most historically truthful, presentment of the great Idealist, Savonarola of Florence. This author now can find no better outlet for the heroine—also an Idealist—because she cannot be a ‘St. Teresa’ or an ‘Antigone,’ than to marry an elderly sort of literary impostor, and, quick after him, his relation, a baby sort of itinerant Cluricaune (see Irish Fairies) or inferior Faun (see Hawthorne's matchless Transformation). Yet close at hand, in actual life, was a woman—an Idealist too—and if we mistake not, a connection of the author's, who has managed to make her ideal very real indeed. By taking charge of blocks of buildings in poorest London, while making herself the rent-collector, she found work for those who could not find work for themselves; she organized a system of visitors; … she brought sympathy and education to bear from individual to individual, … so that one might be tempted to say, ‘Were there one such woman with power to direct the flow of volunteer help, nearly everywhere running to waste, in every street of London's East End, almost might the East End be persuaded to become Christian.’ Could not the heroine, the ‘sweet sad enthusiast,’ have been set to some such work as this? Indeed it is past telling the mischief that is done in thus putting down youthful ideals. There are not too many to begin with. There are few indeed to end with—even without such a gratuitous impulse as this to end them.” In this passage, as in much that Florence Nightingale wrote, there is an autobiographical note. She did not marry because she held fast to an ideal—an ideal nearer to that of Octavia Hill than to that of Dorothea Brooke.

II

For two or three years Florence Nightingale was in much trouble of mind from an attachment which one of her cousins had formed for her. In no case would she have thought it right to marry him. “Accident or relationship,” she wrote some years later,[52] “throw people together in their childhood, and acquaintance has grown up naturally and unconsciously. Accordingly in novels it is generally cousins who marry; and now it seems the only natural thing, the only possible way of making an intimacy. And yet we know that intermarriage between relations is in direct contravention of the laws of nature for the well-being of the race.” It was supposed by some of the family circle at the time that this was the only objection to an engagement; but there were others. Florence was in no mood, then or afterwards, to marry for the sake of marrying. Marriage, she had written to Miss Clarke (p. [66]), was not an absolute blessing; and though she liked her cousin, she was in no sense in love with him. She felt relief, intense and unmixed, as she recorded in her private meditations, when she learnt that the young man had at last forgotten her. But though this episode left her heart-whole, it had a great and painful influence upon her mind. “Cleanse all my love from the desire of creating an interest in another's heart” is the burden of many of her meditations.

Among other attachments of which Florence Nightingale was the object, there was one which had a deeper effect and called for a more difficult and searching choice in life. She was asked in marriage by one who continued for some years to press his suit. It was a proposal which seemed to those about her to promise every happiness. The match would by all have been deemed suitable, and by many might have been called brilliant. And Florence herself was strongly drawn to her admirer. She had not come to this state of mind in hasty inclination. She was on her guard against any such temptation. Many years before, in a letter to her “brother Jonathan,” as she called Miss Hilary Bonham Carter, she had written:—

It strikes me that in all the most unworldly poetry (both prose and verse) la passion qu'on appelle inclination is treated in a very extraordinary way. When one finds a comparative stranger becoming all of a sudden more essential to one than one's family (via flattery, in general, of one sort or another), one is content with saying to oneself, “Oh! that's love,” instead of saying, “How unjust and how blind this feeling is.” I wonder whether if people were to examine—for, as Socrates says, the life unexamined is not a living life—they would not find that (whatever it may ripen to afterwards) this feeling at first is generally begun by vanity or jealousy or self-love; and that what is very much to be guarded against, instead of submitted to, is the stranger's admiration (and I suppose everybody has been susceptible at one time of their lives) having more effect upon one than one's own family's.

In this case, however, the stranger's admiration had stood the test. She felt drawn to him, not by vanity or self-love; but because she admired his talents, and because the more she saw of him the greater pleasure did she find in his society. She leaned more and more upon his sympathy. Yet when the proposal first came, she refused it; and when it was renewed, she persisted. Then, it may be said, she cannot have been “in love” with him. And in one sense that is, I suppose, quite true; for love, as the poets tell us, does not reason, and Florence Nightingale reasoned deeply over her case. But it is certain that she felt at least as much affection as suffices to make half the marriages in the world. She turned away from a path to which she was strongly drawn in order to pursue her Ideal.

In one of the many pages of autobiographical notes which she preserved in relation to this episode in her life, Miss Nightingale thus explained her refusal to marry. “I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. I can hardly find satisfaction for any of my natures. Sometimes I think that I will satisfy my passional nature at all events, because that will at least secure me from the evil of dreaming. But would it? I could be satisfied to spend a life with him combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things.… To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life, without hope of another, would be intolerable to me. Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.”

Florence Nightingale was no vestal ascetic. A true and perfect marriage was, she thought, the perfect state. “Marrying a man of high and good purpose, and following out that purpose with him is the happiest” lot. “The highest, the only true love, is when two persons, a man and a woman, who have an attraction for one another, unite together in some true purpose for mankind and God.”[53] The thought of God in instituting marriage was “that these two, when the right two are united, shall throw themselves fearlessly into the universe, and do its work, secure of companionship and sympathy.” Miss Nightingale recognized also that for many women marriage, even though it may fall short of this ideal state, is the proper lot in life. But she held, on the other hand, that there are some women who may be marked out for single life. “I don't agree at all (she wrote in 1846) that a woman has no reason (if she does not care for any one else) for not marrying a good man who asks her, and I don't think Providence does either. I think He has as clearly marked out some to be single women as He has others to be wives, and has organized them accordingly for their vocation. I think some have every reason for not marrying, and that for these it is much better to educate the children who are already in the world and can't be got out of it, than to bring more into it. The Primitive Church clearly thought so too, and provided accordingly; and though no doubt the Primitive Church was in many matters an old woman, yet I think the experience of ages has proved her right in this.” And again: “Ours is a system of Christianity without the Cross”; the single life was the life of Christ. “Has Heaven bestowed everlasting souls on men, and sent them upon earth for no better purpose than to marry and be given in marriage? True, there is in this world much more waiting to be done; but is it the man leading a secular life who will do it? He is apt to see nothing beyond himself and the fair creature he has chosen for his bride.” And, as with men, so with women. There are women of intellectual or actively moral natures for whom marriage (unless it realizes the perfect ideal) means the sacrifice of their higher capacities to the satisfaction of their lower. “Death,” she wrote (again in a note-book of 1846), “is often the gateway to the Garden where we shall no longer hunger and thirst after real satisfaction. Marriage, on the contrary, is often an initiation into the meaning of that inexorable word Never; which does not deprive us, it is true, of what ‘at their festivals the idle and inconsiderate call life,’ but which brings in reality the end of our lives, and the chill of death with it.”

In her own case, Miss Nightingale was conscious of capacities within her for “high purposes for mankind and for God.” She could not feel sure that the marriage which was offered to her would enable her to employ those capacities to their best and fullest power. And so she sacrificed her “passional” nature to her moral ideal. “I am 30,” she wrote on her birthday in her diary of 1850; “the age at which Christ began His mission. Now no more childish things, no more vain things, no more love, no more marriage. Now, Lord, let me only think of Thy will.” And amongst her sayings in another book, I find this: “Strong passions to teach the secrets of the human heart, and a strong will to hold them in subjection, these are the keys of the kingdom in this world and the next.” Florence Nightingale turned away from marriage in order that she might remain entirely free to fulfil her vocation.

III

It was not a sacrifice which cost her little. If, as some may hold, she was not in love, yet she confessed to herself many of a lover's pangs, and there were moments when, as she met her admirer again, or as she thought of him, she was half inclined to repent of her choice of the single life. And the sacrifice, moreover, was of an immediate satisfaction to an ideal which after all she might never be able to realize. The legends of the saints tell of many virgins and martyrs who have crucified the flesh and sacrificed worldly happiness for the love of Christ. But when the sacrifice was made, the love which seemed to them far better was already theirs. In the ears of St. Agnes the Divine Voice had sounded with sweet assurance, and she had tasted of the milk and honey of His lips. St. Dorothea was already espoused in a garden where celestial fruits and roses that never fade surrounded her. And to Florence Nightingale also happiness was to be given, filling all her life for some years, so that she “sought no better heaven”; but at the time when she made her choice, and renounced all else to follow her ideal, the way before her was still dark and uncertain. She was conscious of a call, but she had no assurance of appointed work. To have entered into a marriage which gave no sure promise of her ideal, would have been, she felt, the suicide of a soul; yet, when she was called to choose between the two paths, her present life was starvation.

Perhaps it was the price which she had paid for her ideal that led to what, in later years, some considered a certain hardness in her. When once a woman had devoted her life to the work of nursing, Miss Nightingale had little sympathy with any turning back. She seemed sometimes in such cases to regard marriage as the unpardonable sin.

But another and a loftier train of thought was prompted by her experience. At the end of one of her meditations upon marriage, and her refusal of it, I find these significant words: “I must strive after a better life for woman.” She did not mean a better life than marriage; she meant also a life that should make the conditions of marriage better. In the world in which she lived, daughters, she wrote, “can only have a choice among those people whom their parents like, and who like their parents well enough to come to their house.” One may doubt whether in the mid-Victorian or in any age, young men paid calls only because they liked the parents; but unquestionably restriction in the employments of women involves also limitation in the opportunities for choice in marriage. And at the same time the lack of interest and variety in the lives of girls at home makes many of them inclined to marriage as a mere means of escape. By throwing open new spheres of usefulness to women, Miss Nightingale hoped at one and the same time to improve the lot of those who were marked out to be wives, and to find satisfaction for those marked out for the single life.

CHAPTER VIII
APPRENTICESHIP AT KAISERSWERTH
(1851)

The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, that he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled.—Carlyle.

Foreign travel had, as we have seen, in no way changed Florence Nightingale's resolve to devote herself to a life of nursing. She had turned away deliberately from marriage, and was bent upon finding a new field of usefulness for unmarried women. But ways and means of doing this were not yet apparent. She had no independent fortune of her own. She returned to a family circle which understood her cravings no better than before. The call of domestic duties was the same as before. There were aunts and a grandmother to be visited, company at home to be entertained, a sister to be humoured, a father and mother to be pleased.

But she could not please them, because she herself could find no pleasure in their life. She did not say to herself that she was better than they. Still less did she thank God that she was not as they were. But she felt with piteous keenness the gulf that separated her alike from her parents and from her sister. She loved her father, and admired his good impulses and amiable character. But she perceived that his contentment in a life of busy idleness made him constitutionally unable to enter fully into her state of mind. She loved her mother, and considered that she was, within her range, a woman of genius. “She has the genius of order,” she wrote in a character-sketch of her mother, “the genius to organize a parish, to form society. She has obtained by her own exertions the best society in England.” What pained the daughter was the inability to please the mother. “When I feel her disappointment in me, it is as if I was becoming insane.” She loved her sister also, and, I think, yet more tenderly. But as the sister once wrote: “The natures God has given us differ as widely as different races.” Florence was deeply sensible of the attractive side of her sister's character. Lady Verney had indeed a most attractive mind; she was very vivacious, inquiring, and highly gifted, both as an artist and as a writer. She was a perfect hostess, and her memory is pleasant to all who knew her. If she lacked some of her sister's stronger English characteristics, she had a light touch which Florence did not possess. And Florence felt the charm of all this. “No one less than I,” she wrote, “wants her to do one single thing different from what she does. She wants no other religion, no other occupation, no other training than what she has. She has never had a difficulty except with me; she knows nothing of struggle in her own unselfish nature.” But for that very reason she could not sympathize with, because she could not understand, her sister's difficulties. In a passage which is doubtless autobiographical, Florence wrote: “Very few people can sympathise with each other in any pursuit or thought of any importance. If people do not give you thought for thought, receive yours, digest it, and give it back with the impression of their own character upon it, then give you one for you to do likewise, it is best to know what one is about, and not to attempt more than kindly, cheerful outward intercourse. Some find amusement in the outward, do not suffer inwardly, because the attention is turned elsewhere.”[54] Meanwhile Florence felt that everything she said or did was a subject of vexation to her sister, a disappointment to her mother, a worry to her father. “I have never known a happy time,” she exclaimed to herself, “except at Rome and that fortnight at Kaiserswerth. It is not the unhappiness I mind, it is not indeed; but people can't be unhappy without making those about them so.”

She strove to attain happiness. She tried to submit her will to what her spiritual confidantes told her must be taken to be the will of God; to trust that in His own good time He would make her vocation sure; in such confidence to find relief, and to throw herself meanwhile into the round of immediate duties. But the more she struggled, the more she failed. She could not subdue the imperious longing to be up and doing which surged within her. “The thoughts and feelings that I have now,” she wrote, “I can remember since I was six years old. It was not that I made them. A profession, a trade, a necessary occupation, something to fill and employ all my faculties, I have always felt essential to me, I have always longed for, consciously or not. During a middle part of my life, college education, acquirement, I longed for, but that was temporary. The first thought I can remember, and the last, was nursing work; and in the absence of this, education work, but more the education of the bad than of the young. But for this I had had no education myself.” Finding no outlet in active reality, she lived more than ever in a land of dreams. “Everything has been tried,” she exclaimed to herself; “foreign travel, kind friends, everything.” And again, “My God! what is to become of me?” Eighteen months before she had resolved on a great effort to crucify her old self, “to break through the habits, entailed upon me by an idle life, of living, not in the present world of action, but in a future one of dreams. Since then nations have passed before me, but have brought no new life to me. In my 31st year I see nothing desirable but death.” She was perishing, as she put it, for want of food; and she could find no impulse to activity. Her habit of late rising grew upon her; for what had she to wake for? “Starvation does not lead a man to exertion, it only weakens him. O weary days, O evenings that seem never to end! For how many long years, I have watched that drawing-room clock and thought it would never reach the ten! And for 20 or 30 more years to do this!” And again, “Oh, how I am to get through this day, to talk through all this day, is the thought of every morning.… This is the sting of death. Why do I wish to leave this world? God knows I do not expect a heaven beyond, but that He would set me down in St. Giles's, at a Kaiserswerth, there to find my work and my salvation in my work.”

II

Such cries from the heart, cries for the food for which she was hungering and which her parents could or would not let her take, filled many a sheet of Florence Nightingale's diaries, letters, and memoranda. “Mountains of difficulties,” as she says in one place, were “piled up” around her. Looking forward to a New Year (1851) she could see nothing in front of her but the same unsatisfying routine. “The next three weeks,” she said, in one of her written colloquies with herself, “you will have company; then a fortnight alone; then a few weeks of London, then Embley; then perhaps go abroad; then three months of company at Lea Hurst; next the same round of Embley company.” And then, with a humorous transition not infrequent in her musings, she asks, “But why can't you get up in the morning? I have nothing I like so much as unconsciousness, but I will try.” As the year advanced a more decided spirit of revolt begins to appear in her diaries. One of her perplexities hitherto had been a doubt whether the “mountains of difficulties” were to be taken as occasions for submission to God's will, or whether they were piled up in order to try her patience and her resolve, and were to be surmounted by some initiative of her own. She now began to interpret God's will in the latter sense. “I must take some things,” she wrote on Whitsunday (June 8, 1851), “as few as I can, to enable me to live. I must take them, they will not be given me; take them in a true spirit of doing Thy will, not of snatching them for my own will. I must do without some things, as many as I can, which I could not have without causing more suffering than I am obliged to cause any way.” She would cease looking for the sympathy and understanding of her mother and sister. “I have been so long treated as a child and have so long allowed myself to be treated as a child.” She would submit to such tutelage no longer.

Various plans had at different times found place in her dreams. She would collect funds for founding a sisterhood, an institution, a hospital; but one thing she saw clearly and consistently. If she were ever to have an opportunity of doing good work in nursing or otherwise in service to the poor, she must first learn her business. There is a long letter of 1850 from her to her father in which she argues the point, not specifically with reference to herself, but as a general proposition. Something more than good intention is necessary in order to do good. Philanthropy is a matter of skill, and an apprenticeship in it is necessary. An opportunity occurred sooner than she had dared to hope which enabled her to serve such an apprenticeship. Her sister was still in bad health, and a visit to Carlsbad was again proposed. She insisted on being allowed to start with her mother and her sister, and to spend at Kaiserswerth the time that they would spend upon the cure and subsequent travels.

She reached Kaiserswerth early in July and stayed there as an inmate of the Institution until October 8.

III

Kaiserswerth is an ancient town on the Rhine, on the right bank, six miles below Düsseldorf. In its Church of the twelfth century a reliquary is shown, in which are preserved the bones of St. Suitbertus, who came there from Ireland to preach the Gospel in 710. Eleven centuries later, a Protestant pastor of Kaiserswerth repaid the debt to the British Isles by founding the famous Institution for Deaconesses which was now to give Florence Nightingale an important part of her training. The order of deaconesses, as she was careful to point out in her account of Kaiserswerth, was known in the Primitive Church; and long before St. Vincent de Paul established the Sisters of Mercy in 1633, Protestant communities had in 1457 organized “Presbyterae,” since “many women chose a single state, not because they expected thereby to reach a super-eminent degree of holiness, but that they might be better able to care for the sick and young.” It was in 1823–24 that the young pastor of Kaiserswerth, Theodor Fliedner, set out on a journey to Holland and England to beg for funds to relieve his parish, which had been ruined by the failure of a silk-mill. In England, the little Princess Victoria headed his list of subscribers. In London he met Mrs. Elizabeth Fry and was greatly impressed with her work in Newgate. Shortly after his return he founded (1826) the Rhenish-Westphalian Prison Association. Presently he met a kindred spirit in Friederike Münster, a woman in comparatively easy circumstances who was devoting herself to reformatory work. They married, and in 1833—in a tiny summer-house in the pastor's garden—a refuge was opened for the reception of a single discharged prisoner. Three years later, they added, on an equally modest scale at first, an Infant School, and a Hospital in which to train volunteer-nurses as deaconesses. From these humble beginnings has grown a great congeries of institutions, the fame of which has spread throughout the philanthropic world. There are thirty branch or daughter houses in various parts of Germany. They are to be found also at Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Smyrna, and Bucharest. “Not only its own daughter houses, but all independent institutions for deaconesses, owe their existence to Kaiserswerth, for all subsequent work wrought by deaconesses whether in France, Switzerland, or America, whether Lutheran, Methodist, or Episcopalian, has been the fruit of the Kaiserswerth tree.”[55]

But the forest began as a tiny acorn. Pastor Fliedner started his work not with grandiose schemes or full-fledged programmes, but with individual cases and personal devotion. This was a point to which Miss Nightingale called particular attention in her account of the place. “It is impossible not to observe,” she said, “how different was the beginning from the way in which institutions are generally founded—a list of subscribers with some royal and noble names at the head—a double column of rules and regulations—a collection of great names begin (and end) most new enterprises. The regulations are made without experience. Honorary members abound, but where are the working ones? The scheme is excellent, but what are the results?” Miss Nightingale's intensely practical genius had ever a holy horror of prospectuses. In some notes written on June 15, 1848, I find this passage:—