Although Princess Alice’s marriage in July, 1862, had deprived the Queen of the constant companionship of this dearly loved daughter, yet the Princess continued to spend part of almost every year with her mother. She returned to England in November, 1862, and stayed with the Queen till after the birth of her first baby, in April, 1863. The Queen was a most tender nurse, and always took a special interest in the granddaughter and god-daughter who had been born under her roof. It was Princess Alice who encouraged the Queen to emerge a little from the seclusion to which she had clung since her widowhood. She promoted little mountain excursions, in which the Queen was induced to take part, in the autumn of 1863. She, and also the Princess Royal, accompanied the Queen in the same year to the ceremony of the unveiling of the Prince’s statue at Aberdeen. It is easy to understand what a trying ordeal this must have been to the Queen. There were dense crowds, loyal and kindly, but silent and full of mournful sympathy; there was no music even,[32] the bands having been forbidden to play,--such a contrast, as the Queen wrote, to “former blessed times.” No wonder that she was “terribly nervous, and longed not to have to go through this fearful ordeal.” The Queen had been present before this at family ceremonies, the marriages of Princess Alice in 1862, and of the Prince of Wales on March 10th, 1863; but the first of these had been of quite a private character, and in the second the Queen had taken no part, merely watching the service from the Royal Closet in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor; but this was her first appearance since her husband’s death at a public ceremony. She “prayed for help.” But, however painful, she felt it was right that she should make the effort, and it helped her to overcome her extreme reluctance to take her part once more in the pageantry and glitter of royalty. Little by little she took up this burden also, helped and encouraged by her children, and from 1866 has from time to time opened Parliament in person, and taken her part as Sovereign in the public functions devolving on her position. There was at one time an undercurrent of rather mean resentment that she did not, after her widowhood, enter into social gayety and lead fashionable life as of old. The loss of her direct personal influence from the social world has been a very real one. But there are limits to human strength and endurance; and those who grumbled because the Queen absented herself from the world of fashion, were probably thinking more of the number and brilliancy of Court functions, and of the supposed benefit to trade accruing therefrom, than of the value of a pure-hearted woman’s influence at the head of society. Mr. John Bright in 1866 gave a trenchant rebuke from a public platform to one of these grumblers, who asserted at a meeting of working-men that the Queen was so absorbed in her own grief as to have lost all sympathy with her people. He said:--