It strikes me that in all the most unworldly poetry (both prose and verse) _la passion qu'on appelle inclination_ is treated in a very extraordinary way. When one finds a comparative stranger becoming all of a sudden more essential to one than one's family (via flattery, in general, of one sort or another), one is content with saying to oneself, "Oh! that's love," instead of saying, "How unjust and how blind this feeling is." I wonder whether if people were to examine--for, as Socrates says, the life unexamined is not a living life--they would not find that (whatever it may ripen to afterwards) this feeling at first is generally begun by vanity or jealousy or self-love; and that what is very much to be guarded against, instead of submitted to, is the stranger's admiration (and I suppose everybody has been susceptible at one time of their lives) having more effect upon one than one's own family's. In this case, however, the stranger's admiration had stood the test. She felt drawn to him, not by vanity or self-love; but because she admired his talents, and because the more she saw of him the greater pleasure did she find in his society. She leaned more and more upon his sympathy. Yet when the proposal first came, she refused it; and when it was renewed, she persisted. Then, it may be said, she cannot have been "in love" with him. And in one sense that is, I suppose, quite true; for love, as the poets tell us, does not reason, and Florence Nightingale reasoned deeply over her case. But it is certain that she felt at least as much affection as suffices to make half the marriages in the world. She turned away from a path to which she was strongly drawn in order to pursue her Ideal. In one of the many pages of autobiographical notes which she preserved in relation to this episode in her life, Miss Nightingale thus explained her refusal to marry. "I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. I can hardly find satisfaction for any of my natures. Sometimes I think that I will satisfy my passional nature at all events, because that will at least secure me from the evil of dreaming. But would it? I could be satisfied to spend a life with him combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things.... To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life, without hope of another, would be intolerable to me. Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide."