Queen Victoria was not altogether free from the morbid tendency of mind “which comes of excessive study of incidents of sorrow and suffering,” and her habit of accumulating sepulchral memorials of relations and friends was one manifestation of it. Her Majesty, too, was a strong believer in the reality and near presence of the spirit world. A writer in the _Quiver_ (March, 1898) states that Mrs. Oliphant’s “Little Pilgrim in the Unseen” was of great interest to her, as, since the death of the Prince Consort, she had manifested a special liking for writings dealing with the mystic and unseen. And to quote from this article:-- “She believes that it is given to our departed loved ones to watch over those who still struggle with the temptations and sorrows of the earthly life. It has been the real consolation of her bereaved years that she felt that the Prince was watching over the events of her life. During her retirement at Osborne, immediately after the Prince Consort’s death, the Queen found ‘her only comfort in the belief that her husband’s spirit was close beside her, for he had promised that it should be so.’ This was told to Dean Stanley by the Queen’s half-sister, the Princess Hohenlohe.” The belief of this kind, it may be added, in the spiritual world, was one of the links which bound together her Majesty and the late Poet-Laureate in affectionate sympathy. In one of his published letters to the Queen the poet wrote: “If the dead, as I have often felt, though silent, be more living than the living, and linger about the planet in which their earth-life was passed, then _they_, while we are lamenting that they are not at our side, may still be with us; and the husband, the daughter, and the son, lost by your Majesty, may rejoice when the people shout the name of your Majesty.” That sentiments such as these found an echo in the heart of her Majesty may be gathered from what she wrote to Lord Tennyson on one of the anniversaries of her wedding-day, which she described as a day that she could never allow to be considered sad: “The reflected light of the sun which has set still remains. It is full of pathos, but also full of joyful gratitude, and he who has left me nearly fifty years ago surely blesses me still.”