"Those blessed ones who do God's will and know it not."
I have never seen either man or woman like her, in her humble
excellence, and I am thankful that, knowing what the circumstances of
her whole life were, she yet seems to me the happiest human being I have
known. She died, as she had lived, in the service of others. When I went
with my father to America, my mother remained in England, and my aunt
came with us, to take care of me. She died in consequence of the
overturning of a carriage (in which we were travelling), from which she
received a concussion of the spine; and her last words to me, after a
night of angelic endurance of restless fever and suffering, were, "Open
the window; let in the blessed light"--almost the same as Goethe's, with
a characteristic difference. It was with the hope of giving her the
proceeds of its publication, as a token of my affectionate gratitude,
that I printed my American journal; that hope being defeated by her
death, I gave them, for her sake, to her younger sister, my aunt
Victoire Decamp. This sister of my mother's was, when we were living in
Covent Garden Chambers, a governess in a school at Lea, near Blackheath.
The school was kept by ladies of the name of Guinani, sisters to the
wife of Charles Young--the Julia so early lost, so long loved and
lamented by him. I was a frequent and much-petted visitor to their
house, which never fulfilled the austere purpose implied in its name to
me, for all my days there were holidays; and I remember hours of special
delight passed in a large drawing-room where two fine cedars of Lebanon
threw grateful gloom into the windows, and great tall china jars of
pot-pourri filled the air with a mixed fragrance of roses and (as it
seemed to me) plum-pudding, and where hung a picture, the contemplation
of which more than once moved me to tears, after I had been given to
understand that the princely personage and fair-headed baby in a boat in
the midst of a hideous black sea, overhung by a hideous black sky, were
Prospero, the good Duke of Milan, and his poor little princess daughter,
Miranda, cast forth by wicked relations to be drowned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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