Life is like a drawing in black and white, in which, of necessity, the black predominates. The stronger the drawing, the darker are the shadows; as in an etching by Rembrandt—the more powerful the life, the more violent the contrasts. The high lights were high indeed in the early days of the two august ladies; the deep gloom of the long night of widowhood, which in each case followed some twenty years of ideal home sunshine, must have weighed all the more heavily for the glory of the mornings which had ushered in their young days; for true it is that “the sorrow’s crown of sorrow is the remembering happier things!” In facing the inevitable, women sometimes show higher courage than men. Nothing could be more brave than the way in which these two Queens bowed to the decrees of fate. The world’s work must be done, though hearts be broken and the joy of life extinguished. They felt that they had duties to their people, and they braced themselves to harness. The death of the Prince Consort was really a far heavier blow to the Queen than that of the Emperor Francis was to Marie Theresia—or, rather, perhaps I should say a more searching blow, with much further-reaching consequences. The Queen lost not only a tenderly worshipped husband and lover, but a mainstay upon which she leant, an adviser in all matters of State, a guiding hand in trouble. Marie Theresia lost a husband whom, little as he deserved it, she loved with all her soul; a man who was all in all to her in her home life, but who in her public life was a mere cypher, playing no part in her queendom. It was, therefore, a braver act of devotion for our great lady in that loneliest of all solitudes, the solitude of a widowed queen, immediately to take up the threads of her complicated statecraft without the assistance of her loving helper, than it was for the Empress to remain as pilot, bereaved indeed, but no more unaided than she had always been. Both laid aside their personal and poignant grief to devote themselves to their work. What remained to them of life—a cruel length of years: in the one case fifteen, in the other forty—was given without reserve to the promotion of the welfare of the fatherland. Duty was to them the supreme call, a voice that only became silent in death. Both are held in grateful and undying memory, for surely no women ever went to their rest with cleaner consciences or with better claim to be hailed as good and faithful servants. THE WALLACE COLLECTION