The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume I Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Florence Nightingale as a girl: about 1845_ _from a drawing by Miss Hilary Bonham Carter_]

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."

[26] From a letter to Catherine Winkworth, written in 1854; for other pa.s.sages in the letter, see pp. 8, 41, 139.

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 sc.r.a.ppiness 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 circ.u.mstances. 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."

[27] Letter of Mrs. Gaskell to Catherine Winkworth, Oct. 20, 1854.

The companions.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s, 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, gla.s.s 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."

[28] _Suggestions for Thought_, vol. ii. p. 385.

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 G.o.d 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 ill.u.s.trative cases as she read. The first scene of the poem--"Paracelsus Aspires"--contains many a pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sages which struck her. She was acc.u.mulating stores of information and reflection. In some remarks upon Lacordaire in one of her note-books I find this pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 Sh.o.r.e 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 a.r.s.enic. 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 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.

[29] The wife of Dr. Richard Fowler, physician to the Salisbury Infirmary, mentioned above, p. 35.

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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d, my G.o.d, 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 grat.i.tude 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 Pere 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 mult.i.tude 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 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 part.i.tion 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 _idee merveilleuse_ to preserve us from the busy devils, which imagination here is always conjuring up. This _idee 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 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 gra.s.s, 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 G.o.d. 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 Sh.o.r.e'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 G.o.d'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 Sh.o.r.e 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!"

[30] The reader will note the recurrence here of some phrases already used in another letter. It is an instance of a point there noted (p. 28).

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 G.o.d. The fear of G.o.d is the beginning, but not the end, of wisdom, for perfect love casteth out fear. It was for the love of G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l_, 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 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 pa.s.sed, 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 h.e.l.l compa.s.sed 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 compa.s.sing us about. What can the future h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l. How little can be done under the spirit of fear; it is the very sentence p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d_ was the ideal which she sought to attain. "The foundation of all must be the love of G.o.d. 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 G.o.dly 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.dly women whose pa.s.sion 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-abas.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.d is the Service of Man_:--