The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume I Part 2

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 Ta.s.so 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 const.i.tutional 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 a.n.a.lysed 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 a.n.a.lysed 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 st.i.tched 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 Derbys.h.i.+re 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 compa.s.s the means to do it. Her faculties were not brought outwards, but were left, by the conditions of her life, to devour themselves inwardly.

[9] The Rev. J. T. Giffard.

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 G.o.d. "I remember her," wrote f.a.n.n.y 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 "G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage of retrospect, she "worked very hard among the poor people" under "a strong feeling of religion."

[10] _A Century of Family Letters_, vol. ii. p. 174.

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 "finis.h.i.+ng" 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, Carca.s.sonne, Nimes, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.sembled 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 entree 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 Saleve. 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 Representatif 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 a.n.a.lysed 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 a.s.sault. 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 pa.s.sport 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 Kostritz, 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 n.o.bles 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, soirees, dancing:

b.a.l.l.s and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day, When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow--

There were Court b.a.l.l.s 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 Vendome (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 Ampere of her, "of French vivacity and English originality." Full at once of _esprit_ and of _espieglerie_, 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 Recamier, 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 Recamier. 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 _Memoires 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 a.s.sisted their hostess in making the tea, were MM.

Fauriel and Mohl--Claude Fauriel, versed in mediaeval and Provencal lore, a man exceedingly handsome, who had captivated Madame de Stael and other ladies besides Mary Clarke in his friends.h.i.+ps; 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'etais amoureux." With M. Mohl, no less than with his wife, Florence Nightingale was on terms of affectionate friends.h.i.+p. Among the frequent visitors whom she and her sister met at Miss Clarke's were Madame Tastu (the poetess), elie de Beaumont (the geologist), Roulin (the traveller and naturalist), Cousin, Mignet, Guizot, Tocqueville, Barthelemy 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?"

[11] _Julius and Mary Mohl_, p. 29.

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 circ.u.mstance; 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 s.h.i.+ne in society."

CHAPTER II

HOME LIFE

(1839-1845)

Her pa.s.sionate, 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sed from childhood to womanhood, came to form other plans. Her life, as she ultimately shaped it, her example, which circ.u.mstances were destined to render far-s.h.i.+ning, 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 debut 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 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 carree_ 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 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 _eloge_ 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, 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.

[12] General Sir Frederick Stovin, G.C.B. He was groom-in-waiting to Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1860.

[13] Many stories of Lord Melbourne and the "dull dog" are now accessible in the Queen's own diaries, but he made friends with the pets in the end. The Queen may have forbidden others to wake her Minister; but she herself objected sometimes, though with a pretty playfulness, to his snoring. See _The Girlhood of Queen Victoria_, vol. ii. p. 240.

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 a.s.sure 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 suns.h.i.+ne and the flowers, by suggesting that G.o.d gave us His blessings to enjoy them. So I _am_ comforted, and set to work to enjoy with all my might, and succeed _a 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 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 pa.s.sionately 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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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]

[14] An expressive, old English word, which often occurs in Miss Nightingale's letters. "As we say in Derbys.h.i.+re," she sometimes added. George Eliot, also of Derbys.h.i.+re, often uses it.

[15] Miss Nightingale took great pains with most of her letters. She often made a rough draft in a note-book, and then used the same words in letters to different correspondents, or used part of the original pa.s.sage in a letter to one correspondent, and part in a letter to another. Here, as in one or two other cases, I reunite pa.s.sages from two letters. One of them was addressed to the same cousin to whom Parthenope wrote.