Chapter 3

Carlton Hotel, Regent Street,June1 [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 inOtello. 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 likeinstrumentalto 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 theLucia 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 hardlyfortypeople! 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 theamende honorablewas then made to Lady Flora, and that in thispartie carréewas 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 forhimagain.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 thenineobstreperous 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'sélogeof 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.…

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 hardlyfortypeople! 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 theamende honorablewas then made to Lady Flora, and that in thispartie carréewas 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 forhimagain.

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 thenineobstreperous 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'sélogeof 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.

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, oril paradiso terrestreas 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 soveryhappy in the sunshine and the flowers, by suggesting that God gave us His blessings to enjoy them. So Iamcomforted, and set to work to enjoy with all my might, and succeedà 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 (suchlong 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 averylong 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.” Avery 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]

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 contemporarieswithin 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 thePillars 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 turnwhen 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,July1844. 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.Weknow 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. TheMerchant of Venicewas 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, andwouldburst 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 abagor apocketfull 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 thepocketshad it by a large majority,and we beat the basebaggitesout 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; ifwewere to make such a noise we should have the police in with swords and cutlasses to divide us!’”

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, orvice 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.)June20 [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 newPast 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 oldfirstedition.

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 wholeworship, the second one's greatestadmiration, and the third one's most livelyinterest. 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 herhome 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 findNotabilitieshere 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.’”

“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 giveherupon 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 intoVestiges[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.

Florence's remark that she would only provide thezéroofespritto Miss Clarke'squatre, 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 laBèche, 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.”

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

Florence Nightingale as a girl: about 1845from 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 entitledA 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 gazeWith calm and holy thoughts, that linkThe 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 voiceTake part in songs of harmony,Well framed to gladden and rejoice;Whilst her ethereal melodyStill 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 glareWhich strikes and rivets every eye.Her grave, but large and lucid eye,Unites a boundless depth of feelingWith Truth's own bright transparency,Her singleness of heart revealing;But still her spirit's historyFrom light and curious gaze concealing.…

I heard her soft and silver voiceTake part in songs of harmony,Well framed to gladden and rejoice;Whilst her ethereal melodyStill 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 glareWhich strikes and rivets every eye.

Her grave, but large and lucid eye,Unites a boundless depth of feelingWith Truth's own bright transparency,Her singleness of heart revealing;But still her spirit's historyFrom 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 getnearan 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. “MakeFlo 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 heren 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.”

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 thatthe 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 itregularly, 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 moreeager 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 ofThe 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, withone'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.”

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 maywell 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'sParacelsus, 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):—

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