Foreign travel, it will thus be seen, had worked no such cure, had created no such diversion, as her family desired. Their hope, even their expectation, was not unreasonable. Florence Nightingale was a woman of learning, and her foreign travels had stimulated her alike to research and to imaginative thought. At home, too, during all the years of restless and unsatisfied yearning for some other life, she had been a diligent reader and student. She had a real gift for literary expression, as her letters may already have indicated, and as her later writings were to prove more decisively. She had, moreover, the instinct for self-expression. She was a constant letter-writer and note-taker. She communed with herself not only in speechless thought, but in written memoranda. Had another impulse not been stronger within her, she might easily have become a literary woman of some distinction. But though she was fond of writing for her own satisfaction, she had a profound distrust of it as a substitute for action. Like one of George Eliot's heroines, "she did not want to deck herself with knowledge--to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action." "You ask me," she had written to Miss Clarke in 1844, "why I do not write something. I think what is not of the first class had better not exist at all; and besides I had so much rather live than write; writing is only a supplement for living. Would you have one go away and 'give utterance to one's feelings' in a poem to appear (price 2 guineas) in the _Belle Assemblée_? I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results. Do you think a babe would _ever_ learn to walk if it were to talk about its living in such 'strange times,' 'I _must_ learn to use my legs,' and so on? Or do you think anybody ever did anything, who did not go to it with a directness of purpose, which prevented him from frittering away his impressions in words?" She was of Ibsen's persuasion:-- What is Life? a fighting In heart and in brain with trolls. Poetry? that means writing Doomsday-accounts of our souls.[48] [48] _Lyrics and Poems from Ibsen_, translated by F. E. Garrett.