Perhaps we shall never any of us fully know what it must have been to one so abounding in spiritual energy and world-wide compassion to have to learn slowly and painfully, through the years that followed, what must henceforth be the physical limitations of her life. When we think of the long, careful training that had been given to her fine gifts of eye and hand in the art that she loved—for she rightly regarded nursing as an art—an art in which every movement must be a skilled and disciplined movement—we may divine something of what it cost to bear, without one murmur of complaint, what she might so easily have been tempted to regard as a lifelong waste of faculty. Instead of allowing herself to dwell on any such idea, gradually, as the knowledge dawned on her of what she must forego, she gave herself, with tenfold power in other directions, to work which _could_ be achieved from an invalid’s couch, and thus helped and guided others in that art all over the world. Among the greetings which pleased her most on her first return to England was an address from the workmen of Newcastle-on-Tyne, to whom she replied in the following letter:— _August 23, 1856._ “MY DEAR FRIENDS,—I wish it were in my power to tell you what was in my heart when I received your letter. “Your welcome home, your sympathy with what has been passing while I have been absent, have touched me more than I can tell in words. My dear friends, the things that are the deepest in our hearts are perhaps what it is most difficult for us to express. ‘She hath done what she could.’ These words I inscribed on the tomb of one of my best helpers when I left Scutari. It has been my endeavour, in the sight of God, to do as she has done. “I will not speak of reward when permitted to do our country’s work—it is what we live for—but I may say to receive sympathy from affectionate hearts like yours is the greatest support, the greatest gratification, that it is possible for me to receive from man. “I thank you all, the eighteen hundred, with grateful, tender affection. And I should have written before to do so, were not the business, which my return home has not ended, been almost more than I can manage.—Pray believe me, my dear friends, yours faithfully and gratefully, “FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.”