“He would not listen to what I read, But wanted it certain—‘The Lady’s dead?’ I showed it him to remove his doubt, And added, unthinking, ‘The Lamp is out.’ “He rose—and I had to help him stand— Then, as he saluted with trembling hand, I was abashed to hear him say, ‘The Lamp she lit is alight to-day.’” F. S. CHAPTER XXIII. _A brief summing up._ Those who write of Florence Nightingale sentimentally, as though she spent herself in a blind, caressing tenderness, would have earned her secret scorn, not unflavoured by a jest; for she stood always at the opposite pole from the sentimentalists, and perhaps had a little of her father in her—that father who, when he was _giving_ right and left, would say to some plausible beggar of society who came to him for wholesale subscriptions, “You see, I was not born generous,” well knowing that his ideas of generosity and theirs differed by a whole heaven, and that his were the wider and the more generous of the two. She had a will of iron. That is what one of her greatest admirers has more than once said to me—and he knew her well. No doubt it was true. Only a will of iron could have enabled a delicate woman to serve, for twenty hours at a time, with unwearying tenderness and courage among the wounded and the dying. Even her iron resolution and absolute fearlessness could not prevent her from taking Crimean fever when she insisted on visiting a second time the lonely typhus patient outside Balaclava, at a moment when she was worn out with six months of nursing and administration combined. But it did enable her to go back to her post when barely recovered, and, later in life, even when a prisoner within four walls, who seldom left her bed, that will of iron did enable her to go on labouring till the age of ninety, and to fulfil for the good of mankind the dearest purpose of her heart. Nothing is harder than iron, and that which is made of it after it has been through the furnace has long been the very symbol of loyalty and uprightness when we say of a man that he is “true as steel.” Yes, iron is hard and makes a pillar of strength in time of need. But he who forges out of it weapons and tools that are at once delicate and resistless, knows that it will humbly shoe the feet of horses, and cut the household bread, and will make for others besides Lombardy a kingly crown. And when iron is truly on fire, nothing commoner or softer nor anything more yielding—not even gold itself—can glow with a more steadfast and fervent heat to warm the hands and hearts of men.