For her own part, as her powers of reflection were strengthened, so did her sense of a vocation become more insistent with every year. In some autobiographical notes, Miss Nightingale records May 7, 1852, as the date at which she was conscious of "a call from God to be a saviour"; but the thought of devoting herself to be a nurse came much earlier. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in the reminiscences quoted above, describes how during the visit of herself and her husband to Embley in 1844, Florence had taken Dr. Howe aside and asked him this question: "If I should determine to study nursing, and to devote my life to that profession, do you think it would be a dreadful thing?" Dr. Howe, it will be remembered, was of wide repute as a philanthropist, and Miss Nightingale thought much of his opinion. It was favourable to her wish. "Not a dreadful thing at all," he replied; "I think it would be a very good thing." "My idea of heaven," she wrote a little time afterwards, "is when my dear Aunt Hannah and I and my boy Shore and all of us shall be together, nursing the sick people who are left behind, and giving each other sympathies beside, and our Saviour in the midst of us, giving us strength." But, meanwhile, she hoped to realize some little piece of the heaven on earth. She pursued other inquiries, laid her plans, kept her own counsel, and then made a first bid for freedom. The nature of her plans, the nipping of them in the bud by maternal frost, and her following dejection are told in a letter to her cousin Hilary (Dec. 11, 1845):--