The Prince wrote immediately on the Queen’s accession to congratulate his “dearest cousin,” and to remind her that in her hands now lay “the happiness of millions.” But he said nothing of his own happiness; nothing was settled, and the correspondence between the cousins was suffered to drop. The Queen generously blames herself for this. A memorandum made by Her Majesty to “The Early Years of the Prince Consort” is very characteristic. “Nor can the Queen now,” she writes, “think without indignation against herself of her wish to keep the Prince waiting for probably three or four years, at the risk of ruining all his prospects for life, until she might feel inclined to marry! And the Prince has since told her that he came over in 1839 with the intention of telling her that if she could not then make up her mind, she must understand that he could not wait now for a decision, as he had done at a former period when their marriage was first talked about.” It is probable that no one but the Queen herself thinks she was to blame in the matter. She had seen her cousin only when he was a boy of seventeen, and she a girl of the same age. She had acquiesced in the wish of her closest advisers that she should regard him as her future husband, but she had at the time of her accession no strong personal feeling in the matter. She did not feel then, as she felt afterwards, that the happiness of her whole future life was involved in this union; and absorbed as she must have been in the intense interest of being the centre of the inner circle of politics, and in learning the duties and going through the ceremonials of her new position, it is no wonder that for a time she dismissed all thoughts of marriage. Indeed, the happiness of what she so often called her “blessed marriage” might have been marred had she not waited till her heart spoke. The Prince Consort’s was a singularly pure and disinterested nature. As a child he possessed a remarkable degree of beauty, and a natural disposition almost without flaw. All the associates of his youth agree in speaking of his perfect moral purity, combined with gayety and courage; but he was not one of those preternaturally perfect children who hardly exist out of books, and even these are generally destined to an early grave. His childish letters and diaries record that he fought with his brother and cried over his lessons like other little boys. When he was only five years old his father and mother separated, and were afterwards divorced. He was henceforth separated entirely from his mother, who died in 1831. Prince Albert resembled his mother in person and mind, and although so early taken from her, he retained through life the strongest feeling of affection for her, and one of his first gifts to the Queen was a little pin which had belonged to his mother. She was beautiful, intelligent, and warm-hearted, and had a great fund of drollery and power of mimicry, which her younger son inherited from her.