Here, again--to revert to what has been said above--it will be found, I think, that this book possesses a certain significance as correcting, or supplementing, a popular legend. A preacher, in an obituary sermon upon Miss Nightingale, said that all her work was done "by force of simple goodness." Assuredly Miss Nightingale was a good woman, and there was also a certain simplicity about her. But there was much else. A man of affairs, who in the course of a long and varied life had come in contact with many of the acutest intellects and greatest administrators of the time, said of Miss Nightingale that hers was the clearest brain he had ever known in man or woman. Strength of head was quite as marked in her as goodness of heart, and she had at least as much of adroitness as of simplicity. Her character was in fact curiously many-sided. A remarkable variety of interests, motives, methods will be found coming into play in the course of this record. The Florence Nightingale who will be shown in it--by her acts, her methods, her sayings, her ways of looking at things and people--is a very different person from Santa Filomena. Miss Nightingale has been given a place among the saints in the popular calendars of many nations; and she deserves the canonisation, but not entirely for the popular reasons. Her character, as I have endeavoured to depict it, was stronger, more spacious, and, as I have felt, more lovable than that of The Lady with the Lamp. PART I ASPIRATION (1820-1854) I go to prove my soul! I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive--what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In his good time. BROWNING: _Paracelsus_. CHAPTER I CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION (1820-1839) I found her in her chamber reading _Phaedon Platonis_ in Greek, and that with as much pleasure as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Bocace.--ROGER ASCHAM. To the tender sentiment and popular adoration that gathered around the subject of this Memoir, something perhaps was added by the beauty of a name which linked together the City of the Flowers and the music of the birds. Her surname suggested to Longfellow the title of the poem which has carried home to the hearts of thousands in two continents a lesson of her life. The popularity of "Florence"--in the Middle Ages a masculine name--as a Christian name for English girls is noted by the historian of that subject as due to association with the heroine of the Crimea.