[Sidenote: Florence Nightingale’s testimony to Martineau’s religious feeling.] I think, contradictory as it may seem, she had the truest and deepest religious feeling I have ever known.... To the last, her religious feeling--in the sense of good working out of evil, of a Supreme Wisdom penetrating and moulding the whole universe; the natural subordination of intellect to purposes of good, even were these merely the small purposes of social or domestic life;--all this, which supposes something without ourselves, higher, and deeper, and better than ourselves, and more permanent, that is, eternal, was so strong in her--so strong that one could scarcely explain her (apparently only) losing sight of that Supreme Wisdom and Goodness in her later years. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: _Letter to Maria Weston Chapman_, published in the latter’s ‘Memorials of Harriet Martineau.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: “The Lady Oracle.”] Her form and features were repellent; she was the Lady Oracle in all things, and from her throne, the sofa, pronounced verdicts from which there was no appeal. Hers was a hard nature: it had neither geniality, indulgence nor mercy. Always a physical sufferer, so deaf that a trumpet was constantly at her ear; plain of person--a drawback of which she could not have been unconscious--and awkward of form; she was entirely without the gifts that attract man to woman: even her friendships seem to have been cut out of stone; she may have excited admiration, indeed, but from the affections that render woman only a little lower than the angels she was entirely estranged. S. C. HALL: ‘Retrospect of a Long Life.’ New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883. * * * * * [Sidenote: Hawthorne’s account of Miss Martineau, 1854.] I saw Miss Martineau a few weeks since. She is a large, robust, elderly woman, and plainly dressed, but withal, she has so kind, cheerful and intelligent a face that she is pleasanter to look at than most beauties. Her hair is of a decided gray, and she does not shrink from calling herself old.... All her talk was about herself and her affairs; but it did not seem like egotism, because it was so cheerful and free from morbidness. And this woman is an Atheist; and thinks that the principle of life will become extinct when her body is laid in the grave! I will not think so, were it only for her own sake. What! only a few weeds to spring out of her mortality, instead of her intellect and sympathies flowering and fruiting forever! NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: ‘Passages from the English Note-Books.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Her home, “The Knoll.”]