In this effort he passed away to his last, long rest, as the great clock of the Castle struck the third quarter after the tenth hour of the night. Those who heard the doleful chime at the Prince’s deathbed will never forget it. “Yet in these ears, till hearing dies, One set slow bell will seem to toll The passing of the sweetest soul That ever look’d with human eyes.” Of the grief that broke the widowed heart of the Queen it is not becoming to speak here. The veil of silence must be drawn over a crisis in her life too sacred, and too tragical even for her children’s eyes. But through England a great wave of sorrow swept over the hearts of men when they became conscious of all that the Prince Consort’s death might imply. Political partisans whose waywardness had harassed the Prince during his life, were not unmoved by the touching story of his last days. Some were even ready to drop a remorseful tear over his grave, when they remembered how eagerly they had, for base party purposes, too often wounded the proud but gentle heart which would now beat no more. The voice of calumny was silenced at last. The _Times_ newspaper, which had pursued the Prince with ungenerous criticism throughout his life, had, to quote the Queen’s own words in a memorandum which she wrote on this painful subject, in January, 1862, “the most beautiful articles on him when he died.” Lord Palmerston also shared in the general grief, and his biographer says that he felt the death of the Prince Consort most acutely, and looked upon it as an irreparable loss. Indeed, he was almost melodramatic in his manifestations of remorse when in presence of a member of the Royal Family. The Duke of Cambridge, [Illustration: THE PRINCESS ALICE READING TO HER FATHER.]