One of her friends, himself a great army doctor holding a high official position, has repeatedly spoken of her to me as the supreme embodiment of citizenship. She did indeed exemplify what Ruskin so nobly expressed in his essay on “Queens’ Gardens”—the fact that, while men and women differ profoundly and essentially, and life would lose in beauty if they did not, the state has need of them both; for what the woman should be at her own hearth, the guardian of order, of health, of beauty, and of love, that also should she be at that wider imperial hearth where there are children to be educated, soldiers to be equipped, wounded lives to be tended, and the health of this and future generations to be diligently guarded. “Think,” she said once to one of her nurses, “less of what you may gain than of what you may give.” Herself, she gave royally—gave her fortune, her life, her soul’s treasure. I read in a recent contemporary of high standing a review which ended with what seemed to me a very heathen sentence, which stamped itself on my memory by its arrogant narrowness. “Woman,” wrote the reviewer, “is always either frustrate or absorbed;” and there leaped to my heart the exclamation, “Here in Florence Nightingale is the answer; for in her we have one, known and read of all men, who was neither the one nor the other.” That there was supreme renunciation in her life, none who is born to womanhood can doubt; for where could there be any who would have been more superbly fitted for what she herself regarded as the natural lot of woman as wife and mother? But she, brilliant, beautiful, and worshipped, was called to a more difficult and lonely path, and if there was hidden suffering, it did but make her service of mankind the more untiring, her practical and keen-edged intellect the more active in good work, her tenderness to pain and humility of self-effacement the more beautiful and just. It has been said, and said truly, that she did not suffer fools gladly, and she knew well how very human she was in this and in other ways, as far removed from a cold and statuesque faultlessness as are all ardent, swift, loving natures here on earth. But her words were words of wisdom when she wrote to one dear to her whom she playfully named “her Cape of Good Hope”: “Let us be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, _but not for unrighteousness_.” The italics are mine, because in their warning they seem so singularly timely. And the entire sentence is completely in tune with that fine note with which she ends one of her delightful volumes on nursing—