I suppose there have been persons who have had so strong _a sense of the identity of their own action with the will of God as to exclude every other feeling, who have never wished to live nor wished to die except as they fulfil his will_? Can we acquire this? I don't know. But _such a sense of things would no doubt give infinite rest and almost infinite power_. Perhaps quietists have been most successful in gaining this sort of feeling, but the quietists are not the people who have passed all their lives rubbing and fighting against the world. But _I don't see why active life might not become a sort of passive life too, passive in the hands of God and in the fulfilment of the laws of nature. I sometimes fancy that there are possibilities of human character much greater than have been realized_, mysteries, as they may be called, of character and manner and style which remain to be called forth and explained. One great field for thought on this subject is the manner in which character may grow and change quite late in life.... [The rest of the letter is about the politics of the day.] The passages which I have printed in italics are those which Miss Nightingale had specially marked. "Can we help one another," he wrote in the following year (March 5, 1865), "to make life a higher and nobler sort of thing--more of a calm and peaceful and never-ending service of God? Perhaps--a little." The marked passages show in what way Miss Nightingale found in Mr. Jowett's friendship a source of comfort, and a fresh inspiration towards her own spiritual ideals. In her meditations of later years, a greater "passivity in action" was the state of perfection which she constantly sought to attain. * * * * * Mr. Jowett, as will have been noted, sought to reassure her about her concentration for the most part upon work for the Army and for India. And indeed she was herself intensely devoted to it, nor was it ever deposed from a principal place in her thoughts and interests. Yet there were times, as shown in a letter already quoted (p. 82), when she felt that this work, insistently though it appealed to her, though it was bound up with some of her fondest memories, was all the while, if not a kind of desertion, yet at best only a temporary call. Her first "call from God" had been to service in another sort, and she was anxious to make peace with "those first affections." In January 1864 she sent these instructions to Mrs. Bracebridge, who directed that if Miss Nightingale should survive her they were to be handed on to Mrs. Sutherland:--