(_To Dr. Farr._) HAMPSTEAD, _August_ 5 [1864].... I am sorry to hear of your griefs. I do not find that mine close my heart to those of others--and I should be more than anxious to hear of _yours_--you who have been our faithful friend for so many years. I had heard of your father's death, but not of any other loss. Sidney Herbert has been dead three years on the 2nd. And these three years have been nothing but a slow undermining of all he has done (at the W.O.). This is the bitterest grief. The mere personal craving after a beloved presence I feel as nothing. A few years at most, and that will be over. But the other is never over. For me, I look forward to pursuing God's work soon in another of his worlds. I do not look forward with any craving to seeing again those I have lost (in the _very_ next world)--sure that that will all come in His own good time--and sure of my willingness to work in whichever of His worlds I am most wanted, with or without those dear fellow-workers, as He pleases. But this does not at all soothe the pain of seeing men wantonly deface the work _here_ of some of His best workers. But I shall bear your faith in mind--that good works never really die. Alas! good Tulloch. But I think his work was done. Pray, if you speak of him, remember--had it not been for him, where would our two Army Sanitary enquiries have been? Miss Nightingale's large circle of correspondents kept her in touch with the literary, as well as with the political, world. She suffered greatly from sleeplessness and read much at night. She seldom read a book without finding something original or characteristic to say about it. "Lately," she wrote to M. Mohl (Jan. 24, 1865), "I have read an English translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The way it interests me is theologically. Otherwise he seems a poor weak mixture of Mahomet and a Mephistopheles. But the arguments which he despises seem to me just the real arguments, the only arguments, if only we believe in a Perfect God, for eternal existence. Do tell me a little about this, and about the Sufis and Firdausi--as regards their belief in a God, and whether the God was good or bad, if any." Omar was new to M. Mohl. Miss Nightingale lent him Fitz-Gerald's version,[66] and M. Mohl read the original. "The tidings," she wrote (April 21), "that you may perhaps print Al Khayyám's quatrains is diffusing joy among a (not large but) select circle, I having communicated it in the 'proper quarter' (see how we are all tarred with the same official stick). If you send me a copy, I shall immediately become a personage of importance." "I read some of Madame Roland's _Memoires_," she wrote to Madame Mohl (May 20, 1865): "but, do you know, I was so disappointed to find out that her patriotism was inspired by a lover. Not that I care much about virtue: I do think 'virtue' by itself a very second-rate virtue.