The further description given by the Queen of this first great sorrow of her life, is exceedingly pathetic and vivid. It is the very poetry of grief. I cannot reproduce it entire, nor give that later story of incalculable loss as related by her in that diary, through which her very heart beats. It is all too unutterably sad. There are passages in this account most exquisitely natural and touching. When all was over, the poor daughter tried to comfort herself with thoughts of the blessed rest of the good mother, of the gentle spirit released from the pain-racked body, but the heart would cry out: "But I--I, wretched child, who had lost the mother I so tenderly loved, from whom for these forty-one years I had never been parted, except for a few weeks, what was my case? My childhood, everything seemed to crowd upon me at once... What I had dreaded and fought--off the idea of, for years, had come, and must be borne... Oh, if I could nave been with her these last weeks! How I grudge every hour I did not spend with her! ... What a blessing we went on Tuesday. The remembrance of her parting blessing, of her dear, sweet smile, will ever remain engraven on my memory." During all this time, the Queen received the most tender sympathy and care from her children, and Prince Albert, was--_Prince Albert_;-- weeping with her, yet striving to comfort her, full of loving kindness and consideration. The Queen's grief was perhaps excessive, as her love had been beyond measure, but he was not impatient with it, though he writes from Osborne, some weeks after the funeral of the Duchess: "She (the Queen) is greatly upset, and feels her childhood rush back upon her memory with the most vivid force. Her grief is extreme... For the last two years her constant care and occupation have been to keep watch over her mother's comfort, and the influence of this upon her own character has been most salutary. In body she is well, though terribly nervous, and the children are a great disturbance to her. She remains almost entirely alone." How true to nature! When the first love of a life is suddenly uprooted, all the later growths, however strong, seem to have been torn up with it. When the mother goes, only the child seems to remain. Victoria, tender mother as she herself was, and adoring wife, was now the little girl of Kensington and Claremont, whose little bed was at the side of her mother's, and who had waked to find that mother's bed empty, and forever empty! And yet she said in her first sense of the loss: "I seemed to have lived through a life; to have become old."