The result is known. On great ceremonial occasions Elizabeth consented to appear, as she put it, “in harness,” and performed imperial functions with splendid, though perhaps absent-minded, dignity. She was as beautiful as the Empress Eugénie. She had a grander—a less skittish—manner; and she quite understood that the frame in which her beauty and grandeur were set at Schönbrunn and the Hofburg threw a halo of glory about her head, quite different from that which adorned the rival beauty who was Queen of the Revels at the Tuileries, Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud, and Compiègne. But she was, nevertheless, always glad when the functions were over and the harness could be taken off. She was like Little Nell’s grandfather, whose one desire was to be “further away.” She never lost that impulse; and, if it ever slackened, something was always sure to happen to renew it. It received a great impetus from the Tragedy of Meyerling; perhaps—it is hardly doubtful—an earlier impetus from the incident which drew from her the bitter remark that “a baby is the end of many love affairs.” So she wandered as much as she could—though she returned to Vienna when she felt that she must—and a detailed relation of her wanderings would almost read like a chapter from a road-book. She saw the Isles of Greece and the Norwegian Fiords. She bathed on the coast of Norfolk, and hunted in Ireland and in the Shires. She sojourned, for a season, at Steephill Castle near Ventnor in the Isle of Wight—the present dwelling of an American gentleman who sells medicines reputed to be beneficial to the liver; and a red-brick house in which she passed another season is pointed out at Cromer. She also went to Amsterdam for massage, and to Cap Martin to sit in the sun; and she visited her home in Bavaria, and her sisters’ homes in Paris, and stayed at Claridge’s in London, and drank the waters at Kissingen. It was sometimes thought that she deliberately courted death by her daring feats of horsemanship. Her manner became that of a woman for whom life had nothing left, except what converse with Nature could offer. She even spoke of Nature as her “sole mediator with God”; and the scattered fragments of her table talk which those who knew her have preserved, are full of detached sentiments of a kind of poetic pessimism: “We must try to make islands of ourselves.” “When we cannot be happy in the way that we desire, there is nothing for it but to fall in love with our sorrows.” “In the life of every man there comes a time when his inner life becomes extinct.” “I know that he who revolts suffers a hundred times more than he who is resigned; but resignation is a thing of which I am not capable.” “I should like to be buried near the sea, so that the waves might beat against my coffin. Then all the stars in Heaven would shine on me, and the cypresses would lament for me far longer than either men or women.”