WITH THE RETURN OF the Nightingales to London the first great struggle of Miss Nightingale's life began. It was divided into two stages and lasted fourteen years. First she groped within herself for five years before she reached the certainty that her "call" was to nurse the sick; next a bitter conflict with her family followed, and nine more years passed before she was able to nurse.

In April, 1839 Fanny and William Nightingale had no inkling of Florence's secret life of agony, aspiration, and despair. They congratulated themselves on the possession of a charming and gifted young daughter destined for a brilliant social success. She was graceful, witty, vividly good-looking. Among the Verney Nightingale papers are two small oblong packets, carefully wrapped in several thicknesses of black paper, which contain two tresses of hair tied with silk and labeled in Fanny's writing "Flo 1839" and "Parthe 1839." The hair has been so well protected that it might have been cut yesterday. Florence's hair is of unusual beauty, bright chestnut in color, thick, glossy, and wavy. In middle age her hair became dark, but at nineteen it was golden-red. Parthe's hair has less life and color; it is light brown, almost blonde, fine, soft, and straight.

The Nightingales reached London on April 6. W. E. N. went down to Embley and found the alterations would not be finished by June; Fanny then decided to spend the whole season in London. Her sister, Mrs. Nicholson, was bringing out her two elder girls, and the families united to take a floor of the Carlton Hotel. On May 24 Florence and Parthe were presented at the Queen's birthday Drawing Room. Florence, wearing a white dress bought in Paris, looked, wrote Fanny, "very nice," and "was not nearly as nervous as she expected."

The girls were caught up in a whirl of gaiety. Wherever the Nicholsons went, they met hosts of friends; carpets were rolled up for dancing; the air rang with screams of laughter; servants ran about; impromptu meals appeared. W. E. N. called it the "Waverley Saturnalia." "The piano," he remarked, "is not their forte."

Once more her "call" vanished from Florence's mind; once more she became absorbed in parties and dresses and partners and balls. The summer was hot, the hotel noisy; she was exhausted, deliriously happy, perpetually excited.

She had been seized by a "passion" for her cousin, Marianne Nicholson. "I never loved but one person with passion in my life and that was her," she wrote in 1846. Marianne was dazzlingly beautiful---"that brilliant face is almost as the face of an angel." She had exceptional musical gifts, an exquisite soprano voice, and possessed a confidence in her own charm which enabled her to dare anything. She would even take hold of W. E. N. and shake him. "I was internally screaming with laughter," wrote Florence to Hilary Bonham Carter. "I should think no one ever shook my Papa's sacred person before."

But to love Marianne was dangerous. Her moods were unpredictable; she was angel and devil, pointlessly cruel, pointlessly kind, generous or mean, malicious or good-natured, truthful or a liar without reason or motive.

Marianne's capacity to love was reserved for her family. She adored her brothers and sisters. All the Nicholsons adored each other and stood by each other through thick and thin, and of all her family the one Marianne loved best was her brother Henry.

By an unhappy chance Henry fell in love with Florence. She did not love him, but she encouraged him because he brought her closer to Marianne.

In September, W. E. N. decided that, finished or not, Embley must be occupied. The move was a series of disasters. They arrived to find men still working in the house and retreated to one of the lodges. Several days passed in discomfort. At last the move was fixed. That day a hurricane broke, the worst storm of a stormy autumn. The Nightingales waited all the morning, but not a soul appeared. W. E. N. went up to the house to "do housemaid," and late in the afternoon Fanny and Florence determined to follow. The drive was under water, and they waded to the house. It was deserted; the servants had failed to arrive. W. E. N. lighted a fire in the servants' hall, and hungry and shivering they peered into the larder. It contained nothing but joints of raw meat. Darkness fell, and still no one came. At last the sound of wheels was heard. Florence rushed out. It was a cart containing "a man in a cloak carrying a looking glass." W. E. N. took a candle from a carriage lamp and stuck it on a spike, and they sat by its glimmering light. W. E. N. was in excellent spirits---he found their situation diverting. When the servants at last appeared, their explanations were unsatisfactory. The steward spoke "with tears in his eyes," but the truth was that the servants refused to start until they had had their tea, and there was a further difficulty because Mrs. Gale thought it beneath her dignity to be conveyed in a cart.

Embley was now a handsome house, "able to receive five able bodied females with their husbands and belongings," wrote Florence to Clarkey in October, 1839. Fanny's descriptions of the drawing-room mention fawn-colored walls "pale and cool with gold mouldings," a blue ceiling "as skiey as possible," "purple silk cushions ornamented with gold fleur de lys," and a set of chairs in tapestry "with a blue and white ground but worked in a variety of colours with red predominating in the groups of flowers or figures." The sofas were covered in red silk damask. The carpet was "green of a yellowish tint" and considered "a great prize." Fanny had fallen in love with the "veloutés" she had seen in Paris and had had a carpet specially woven at Axminster in the same design; this carpet is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. W. E. N. had the library enlarged and put in new shelves of oak elaborately carved in a Gothic style with each section divided by a caryatid. On top of the shelves stood antique busts, and the windows were hung with heavy crimson curtains intricately draped and looped.

Straightening the house and settling the servants filled the next two months. It was not until the New Year that Florence could draw breath. She was deeply, furiously discontented, with life and with herself. Her infatuation for Marianne was perpetual torture. She had let Henry fall more in love with her than ever. Toward making herself worthy, toward justifying her "call" she had done nothing. Her life at home was hateful; impossible that God should have bestowed the gift of time on His female creatures to be used as Fanny wished her to use it. "Faddling twaddling and the endless tweedling of nosegays in jugs," Clarkey called it.

Miserable, irritable, bored, she became unwell. She was rescued by Aunt Mai, whose visit at Christmas had transformed their relationship. They were now devoted friends, no longer fond aunt and adoring little niece but equals reveling in closest intimacy. Aunt Mai was W. E. N.'s sister and possessed many of his qualities---intellectual curiosity, humor, interest in abstract speculation. She, too, had a leaning toward the metaphysical and the transcendental, and her love for Florence had a mystical quality. In spite of their difference in age she worshiped Florence with the worship of a disciple for a master. She placed Florence above ordinary humanity, above the claims even of her husband and her children, and became her protector, interpreter, and consoler. Aunt Mai's tact, her energy, her flow of words were inexhaustible, and in innumerable letters, almost always undated, written on flimsy paper with a thin pen, criss-crossed on every page, she endeavored in a flood of apologies, explanations, excuses, to make life easier for Florence. In January, 1840 she persuaded Fanny that "Flo would be all the better for a little change," and, at the end of the month, Florence was allowed to pay a visit to Combe Hurst.

At once her spirits soared. London was buzzing with gossip of Queen Victoria's wedding, and she wrote a lively account of the ceremony on February 10. "There were but 3 Tories there. Ld Melbourne pressed the Queen to ask more, told her how obnoxious it was. Queen said 'It is my marriage and I will only have those who can sympathise with me.' Mr. Harcourt told Lord Colchester that there was a great levee to receive the Prince and they were all standing with the Queen ready to receive him. When his carriage was announced, she walked out of the room. Nobody could conceive what she was going to do, and before anyone could stop her, she had run downstairs and was in his arms."

Florence went to several dinners and to the opera, received a flattering number of Valentines, and spent a great deal of her time with Aunt Mai's children. On the surface she was happy enough, charming enough, gay enough, but beneath the surface was agony and despair. It was three years since she had been "called," and she still did not know to what. That was the frightful dilemma---what had she been called to do? The first necessity was to improve herself, to become worthy. God was waiting for her to become worthy before He could give her instructions. But how was she to make herself worthy?

She had written to Clarkey that mathematics gave her certainty: mathematics required hard work, and perhaps she would find life more satisfactory, be more satisfactory herself, if she studied mathematics. She confided in Aunt Mai, and they began to work together, getting up before it was light to avoid disturbing the routine of the house. She became wildly happy. If only her parents would let her have lessons, if only they could be persuaded to let her study mathematics instead of doing worsted work and practising quadrilles.

In March, 1840, Aunt Mai wrote Fanny a cautious letter. "Flo and I have a good deal of talk about the employment of time and so forth. I am much impressed with the idea that hard work is necessary to give zest to life in a character like hers, where there is great power of mind and a more than common inclination to apply. So I write to ask you if you in any way object to a mathematical master, if one can find a clean middle-aged respectable person . . . of course shall not do anything without your permit. . . .

Fanny did not approve; home duties were not to be neglected for mathematics. Aunt Mai hastened to assure her there was no neglect: "Flo and I have begun getting up at 6, lighting our fire and sitting very comfortably at our work, and I think if she had a subject which required all her powers and which she pursued regularly and vigorously for a couple of hours she would be happier all day for it . . . she is disappointed at her want of success in music. . . . I allow her quadrille playing is bad."

Her daughter's destiny, Fanny answered, was, she sincerely hoped, to marry, and what use were mathematics to a married woman? "If she throws up her mathematics," Aunt Mai replied, "in the more active and interesting pursuits of future life in which I hope I may live to see her powers engaged, whatever she may have done in that line will have benefited her character." In a burst of sincerity she added a postscript: "I don't think you have any idea of half that is in her."

Fanny would not give way. Letters flew backward and forward. Where were Florence's lessons to be given? If at her grandmother's in Bedford Square there would be a problem about Aunt Patty. Patty was getting peculiar. There were "outbreaks," and it would not be suitable for Florence to meet her. Fanny's brother, Mr. Octavius Smith, offered the use of his library. Fanny raised difficulties about the master. Would it not be more suitable to have a clergyman; was the master proposed a married man; was there not a class; who would be present during the lessons? Aunt Mai persevered, soothing, reassuring, producing a married man, a clergyman, one accustomed to teaching young ladies, a chaperon. W. E. N. then entered the correspondence with an entirely new consideration. "Why Mathematics? I cannot see that Mathematics would do great service. History or Philosophy, natural or moral, I should like best." In reply Aunt Mai reported a dialogue. "I told Flo this preference." "I don't think I shall succeed so well in anything that requires quickness as in what requires only work ... .. Then you prefer mathematics?" "Yes."

All Aunt Mai could obtain was a compromise. She enlisted the aid of the Octavius Smiths. Mrs. Octavius Smith had been ill and asked that Florence, whose gift for managing children was well known, should be allowed to come and stay with her and help with the children. Fanny agreed that she might go for a month, and during part of April and May, 1840 she stayed with the Octavius Smiths and had a lesson in mathematics twice a week in their library. In the middle of May she went back to Embley, and the mathematics lessons came to an end.

In the summer of 1840 Fanny had a series of house-parties at Embley. Clarkey came for a long visit, and Fauriel and Julius Mohl. Fanny's circle had lately been extended by a friendship with the Palmerstons. In 1839 Lord Palmerston married Lady Cowper, widow of Earl Cowper and sister of Lord Melbourne, and settled at Broadlands, near Romsey, a few miles from Embley. The Palmerstons took a fancy to the Nightingales, and a friendship sprang up. "The Palmerstons ask us to dine en famille, I mention this merely to show how friendly they are," W. E. N. had written to Florence in April. During the summer the Palmerstons were constantly at Embley, bringing with them their son-in-law Lord Ashley, better known by his subsequent title of Lord Shaftesbury, the reformer and philanthropist, founder of the Ragged School Union.

And still Florence was not satisfied. The previous autumn she had complained that she had no one to talk to; now she complained she had too many people to talk to. She had said she must have intelligent conversation and exchange of ideas; now she said she must have time for study.

Among her cousins her most intimate friend was Hilary Bonham Carter, eldest of the six daughters of Fanny's sister Joanna. Hilary, who was a year younger than Florence, had been devoted to her from childhood. She was unusually pretty and had a talent for painting; a self-portrait shows a charming little pointed face framed in heavy bands of soft hair, a wide forehead, large eyes under delicate brows, a sensitive mouth, and an expression of intelligence and sweetness. When in 1838 her father had died, she had become the support of her mother, a nervous unpractical woman overwhelmed by the responsibility of bringing up a large family unaided. Florence made Hilary the confidant of her difficulties, pouring out her soul in enormous letters, telling almost all---but not all. The story of her "call" on February 7, 1837, she confided to no one.

She had a feeling of oppression, she felt herself pursued by servants, guests, relations in a clutching, demanding horde. "There are hundreds of human beings always crying after ladies," she wrote to Hilary Bonham Carter in 1841 . "Ladies' work has always to be fitted in, where a man is, his business is the law." She wrote the phrase again in a private note: "Hundreds of human beings always crying after ladies," and added, "I must have some leisure to find out a few things."

She had no leisure. Christmas, 1841 was spent at Waverley. Fanny described the festivities in a letter to W. E. N., who had refused to leave home, as "awesome." Eighty people slept in the house. There was a huge masked ball which went on until five o'clock in the morning, succeeded the following night by an amateur performance of The Merchant of Venice. Henry played Shylock, rushed up to London where Macready was performing the part, interviewed him in his dressing-room, and secured directions for the interpretation of the part. He had come down from Cambridge, was preparing to be called to the Bar, and was still desperately in love with Florence. In March the Nightingales went to London for the season and took rooms at the Burlington Hotel, Old Burlington Street.

Florence was very gay. Though she was only twenty-two, she was becoming a figure in intellectual society. Her demure exterior concealed wit. She danced beautifully, yet possessed a surprising degree of learning, had great vitality and was an excellent mimic. She was "very much noticed," Fanny wrote, by the new Prussian Ambassador, the Chevalier Bunsen, and his wife. The Bunsens united intellect, good breeding, and wealth. The Chevalier (he was created Baron in 1857) was a Biblical scholar of European reputation who shared with his friend Lepsius the credit of being the world's leading Egyptologist; he had married an Englishwoman of good family, was extremely rich, and had a house in Carlton House Terrace besides a place in Sussex. The Bunsens were close friends of the Queen and Prince Albert and were liberal Evangelicals. Florence, who went constantly to their house, was addressed by the Chevalier as "My favourite and admired Miss Nightingale"; he lent her books and discussed archaeology and religion with her.

She had achieved a success and could not help feeling satisfaction; yet she reproached herself bitterly. "All I do is done to win admiration," she wrote in a private note. She cared too much for lights, pretty clothes, glitter, the allurements she called in her private notes "the pride of life." Over and over again she told herself that before she could hope to be worthy enough for God to reveal the path of service the temptation to shine in society must be conquered.

In the summer of 1842 the temptation to shine was greatly increased. In May at a dinner-party given by the Palmerstons at Broadlands, Florence was introduced to Richard Monckton Milnes. In 1842, Richard Monckton Milnes was thirty-three. He was the only son of Mr. Richard Pemberton Milnes and heir to the estate of Fryston in Yorkshire. He had achieved a brilliant success in London society and was predicted an important political career.

He wrote talented poetry himself but had an even greater talent for discerning poetic genius. In 1848 he was responsible for the collection and publication of the first collected edition of the poems of Keats. The breakfasts he gave in his rooms in Pall Mall were famous. He invited everyone in the public eye whether famous or notorious, whether known to him or not. Carlyle, when asked what he thought would be the first thing to happen if Christ came to earth again, said: "Monckton Milnes would ask him to breakfast."

He diffused amiability. "He always put you in a good humour with yourself," said Thackeray; and his wit was never malicious---life was his target, not humanity. Life, he was fond of saying, is a jest not witty but humorous. His kindness and generosity were based on love for his fellow men. "No one who knew Richard ever hesitated to ask him a favour," wrote one of his friends. He was "a good man to go to in distress," wrote another. "He treated all his fellow mortals as if they were his brothers and sisters," said Florence.

His humanity expressed itself in philanthropic work. He loved children and worked for many years, against ceaseless opposition, to improve the treatment of young criminals. It was largely owing to his efforts that juvenile offenders ceased to be sent to jail with adult criminals and were sent to reformatories instead.

But he had another side to his character. The humane lover of children, the connoisseur of literature was also the man who introduced Swinburne to the works of the Marquis de Sade.

During the summer Richard Monckton Milnes came several times to Embley. He was falling in love with Florence, and he made himself the friend of Fanny, Parthe, and W. E. N. By the end of July, when as usual the Nightingales went north to Lea Hurst, he was treated as one of the family.

Fanny had connections in northern society; earlier in the year she had met the Duke of Devonshire and been asked to dine. Now she, W. E. N., and the two girls were invited to stay at Chatsworth to meet H.R.H. the Duke of Sussex. All the society of the north assembled, and in honor of the Royal guest the huge house was crammed with "Howards, Cavendishes, Percys, Greys, all in gala dress with stars, garters, diamonds and velvets," wrote Fanny to Clarkey in August, 1842. The entertainment was planned on an enormous scale. Mr. Joseph Paxton, later designer of the Crystal Palace, was head gardener at Chatsworth, and he had erected a vast glasshouse in the Park. "An omnibus," wrote Fanny, "plied at the gates of Chatsworth every evening to take those who could not walk so far to the monster conservatory, which covers an acre of ground, and where groves of palms and bananas are making all haste to grow to their natural size." One evening the huge glasshouse was brilliantly lit for a "promenade." Another evening there was a magnificent ball to open a new banqueting hall.

Florence was indifferent to the splendors of Chatsworth; the devotion of Richard Monckton Milnes left her unmoved. Some time in the summer of 1842 she had taken the first step toward the fulfillment of her destiny. She had become conscious of the world of misery, suffering, and despair which lay outside her little world of ease and comfort.

Eighteen forty-two was a terrible year for the people of England. The country was in the grip of what has passed into history as "the hungry forties." In villages, as in towns, there were starvation, sweated labor, ignorance, and dirt. Diseased scarecrows swarmed not only in the airless undrained courts of London, but in the "black filth" of rural cottages; workhouses, hospitals, and prisons were overflowing. In the summer of 1842, Florence wrote in a private note: "My mind is absorbed with the idea of the sufferings of man, it besets me behind and before . . . all that poets sing of the glories of this world seems to me untrue. All the people I see are eaten up with care or poverty or disease."

She had progressed. She knew now that her destiny lay among the miserable of the world, but what form that destiny was to take she still had no idea.

In the autumn of 1842 she called on the Bunsens, and Baroness Bunsen, in her Memoir of her husband, records that she asked him a question couched more or less in these words. "What can an individual do towards lifting the load of suffering from the helpless and miserable?" In reply, he mentioned the work of Pastor Fliedner and his wife at Kaiserswerth, on the Rhine, where Protestant Deaconesses were trained in the hospital of the Institution to nurse the sick poor. Florence's attention was not arrested; she had not yet begun to think of nursing.

Meanwhile her mother steadily progressed to social success, and at Embley party followed party. "Pray send him a sly line that he will find notabilities here on the 24th," wrote W. E. N. to Clarkey in October, 1843, arranging a visit from Ranke the historian, "---to wit the Speaker [Shaw Lefèvre], the Foreign Secretary [Palmerston], the Catholic Weld [future owner of Lulworth and nephew of the Cardinal of that Ilk] and mayhap a Queen's Equerry or two, a Baron of the Exchequer . . . and a couple of Baronets. He should think well on this. Yours quizzically but faithfully, W. E. N." Florence scribbled a postscript: "Papa is quizzing the baronets who are not wise ones. Provided you come I care for nobody, no not I, and shall be quite satisfied. As M. de Something said to the Staël 'Nous aurons à nous deux de l'esprit pour quarante; vous pour quatre et moi pour zéro.'"

She had formed her own circle. She saw Richard Monckton Milnes constantly and had become interested in his philanthropic work. She had a new friend, Miss Louisa Stewart Mackenzie, later the second wife of Lord Ashburton. The Palmerstons were devoted to her, and she was very friendly with Lord Ashley.

But when, at the end of July, 1843, the Nightingales once more went north to Lea Hurst, her whole being was concentrated on the poor and sick. She began to spend the greater part of her day in the cottages, began to badger her mother in and out of season for medicines, food, bedding, clothes. Fanny, who was generous in distributing charity, felt Florence was unreasonable. "Perhaps if we got a Soeur de Charité Flo would let us rest in some peace," she wrote to W. E. N. during the summer of 1843.

When the time came to go to Embley, Florence wanted to stay behind at Lea Hurst. Fanny would not hear of her remaining, and she had to come south. "It breaks my heart to leave Lea Hurst," she wrote to Aunt Mai in September, 1843.

When her mother had succeeded in getting Florence away, fresh difficulties arose. One of her friends died in childbirth, leaving a daughter. Florence demanded permission to cancel her engagements, give up London for the autumn season, and look after the baby. When Fanny refused, she fretted herself into an illness. Forced to give way, Fanny compromised by allowing her to go and look after the baby for a few weeks---at the height of the season when she should have been in London going to parties. Fanny was bitterly disappointed, and misery resulted on both sides.

Florence's misery was a thousand times increased by a terrifying discovery. She records in a private note that in the autumn of 1843 she suddenly realized the extent to which the habit she called "dreaming" had enslaved her. She fell into "trance-like" states in the midst of ordinary life, while, for instance, she was making conversation with the Ashburtons at Sir William Heathcote's dinner. She could not control herself, and she gave way with the shameful ecstasy of the drugtaker.

The whole world went wrong for her in the winter of 1843. Henry Nicholson was pressing her to become engaged to him, Marianne was beginning to be angry with her for not accepting him. When Christmas came and she found herself at Waverley with Henry and Marianne---the strain became too great, and she broke down. As she lay in bed listening to the sounds of revelry floating up from downstairs, she despaired. Was there nothing for her but dreaming? Had she better close her eyes and find what satisfaction she could in a false paradise of consoling visions? And then, she wrote in a private note, "an acquaintance with a woman to whom all unseen things seemed real and eternal things near, awakened me."

Miss Hannah Nicholson, sister of Mr. Nicholson of Waverley, called Aunt Hannah by the Nightingales, was a deeply religious woman with the gentleness, purity, and limited vision of a nun. She did not understand Florence; there were depths, violences, capacities in her she was unable to grasp, but she knew Florence was ill, not on good terms with her family, and unhappy. She believed she could provide the solution. Union with God would bring reconciliation with earthly life. A close intimacy sprang up. Days were spent discussing the life of the soul and the way of the soul to God. Florence had an enormous amount of unexpended affection. In a private note, written at this time, she speaks of "those I love---and no-one knows how I love." She adored Aunt Hannah, and became her disciple.

There was, however, an essential difference between them which Miss Nicholson did not appreciate. Though Florence sought union with God, she did not seek that state as an end in itself. Union with God was a necessary qualification for the performance of God's work, a preparation for action, not submission. Aunt Hannah believed that once Florence's soul was one with God she would be reconciled to the state of life to which it had pleased Him to call her.

In January, 1844, Florence went back to Embley and began to write Aunt Hannah letters of enormous length. "When I write the floodgates of my egotism are opened by your sympathy." She called her letters "my outpourings." But she did not write either of her "call" or of her dreams, and at the very moment when she seemed to be most thoroughly under Aunt Hannah's influence she took a secret decision of the greatest importance entirely opposed to everything Miss Nicholson hoped.

Sometime in the spring of 1844 the knowledge came to her that her vocation lay in hospitals among the sick. At Iasi, seven years after her "call," her destiny was clear. "Since I was twenty-four," she wrote in a private note thirteen years later, ". . . there never was any vagueness in my plans or ideas as to what God's work was for me."

In June Dr. Ward Howe, the American philanthropist, and his wife Julia Ward Howe, later to become celebrated as the author of the "Battle Hymn of the American Republic," came to stay at Embley. Dr. Howe's daughter describes in a book of reminiscences how after dinner on the night of his arrival Florence came up to him in the drawing-room. Would he meet her privately in the library for a few moments before breakfast? Dr. Howe consented. When husband and wife were alone, Mrs. Ward Howe reminded him that they had heard the younger Miss Nightingale described as an exceptional girl likely to make an exceptional career for herself, though her mother would prefer her to lead a more conventional life. In the library next morning Florence went straight to the point: "Dr. Howe, do you think it would be unsuitable and unbecoming for a young Englishwoman to devote herself to works of charity in hospitals and elsewhere as Catholic sisters do? Do you think it would be a dreadful thing?" He gave a sincere answer: "My dear Miss Florence, it would be unusual, and in England whatever is unusual is thought to be unsuitable; but I say to you 'go forward,' if you have a vocation for that way of life, act up to your inspiration and you will find there is never anything unbecoming or unladylike in doing your duty for the good of others. Choose, go on with it, wherever it may lead you and God be with you."

She had reached the turning-point of her life, but she confided in no one. The word "hospital" had not yet been uttered to her family; she was well advised to hesitate before introducing it; it was a dread word. She must think out some method by which her parents might be brought to consent to their daughter entering a hospital. Throughout the summer she meditated in secret. "I dug after my little plan in silence," she wrote.

It was an unsatisfactory summer. Marianne and Henry Nicholson came to stay; Marianne was cold, and the visit was not a success. Claude Fauriel died in July, and Clarkey did not feel equal to paying her usual visit to Embley, to Florence's deep disappointment. The illness of the previous winter, misery over Marianne, the weight of the shameful secret of her "dreams," the perpetual frustration of her life at home, brought her low, and she wrote Clarkey an unhappy letter. "Oh do not say that 'you will not cloud young people's spirits.' Do you think young people are so afraid of sorrow, or that if they have lively spirits, which I often doubt, they think these are worth anything, except in so far as they can be put at the service of sorrow? . . . When one thinks there are hundreds and thousands of people suffering . . . when one sees in every cottage some trouble which defies sympathy---and there is all the world putting on its shoes and stockings every morning all the same---and the wandering earth going its inexorable treadmill through those cold hearted stars, in the eternal silence, as if nothing were the matter; death seems less dreary than life at that rate."

That summer when she went north to Lea Hurst there was scarlet fever in the cottages, and she was forbidden to go near them. All through the autumn she was ailing, and when, at Christmas, Fanny and Parthe went to Waverley she was too ill to go. She stayed in bed at Embley pouring out letters, notes, analyses, plans; striving to find a way to get away from home to a hospital; striving to find a solution to her relations with Marianne; striving to achieve the state of union with God in which Aunt Hannah assured her all difficulties would vanish.

On New Year's Eve, 1844, she was unable to leave her room and sat writing late at night with "a little black tea pot on the hob." Outside it was freezing hard with a brilliant moon. She watched three hares playing on the whitened grass of the lawn; in the stillness the world seemed to be dead except for those three hares. At Waverley at this moment there was a ball. She sighed after the ball and the dress she had been going to wear, a pink dress with black lace flounces, ruefully aware that the "pride of life" was by no means dead. "I am convinced of it when I think of my black lace flounces," she wrote to Aunt Hannah.

In a fortnight or so she was convalescent, and Hilary Bonham Carter came to stay. She was another victim of family life. In the previous year Hilary had met Clarkey. With Clarkey she had attended an atelier and was pronounced to have genuine talent. Clarkey had implored Mrs. Bonham Carter to let Hilary work seriously. But Hilary could not be "spared." Now she was spending her life housekeeping, teaching her younger sisters, doing the flowers, and, as a concession, attending a "ladies' atelier" in London where so little was expected that lessons were taken "when social engagements permitted."

The girls were alone for two days-, the weather was fine and still, -and they made long expeditions into the New Forest, walking from breakfast until sunset, and talking all day. Florence poured out her heart on the subject of Marianne, but she spoke neither of her determination to work in hospitals nor of the shameful secret of her "dreams"---that ever-growing terror. During the forced inaction of her illness and the idleness of her convalescence she had found herself more enslaved than ever before, and she was beginning to fear for her mental balance.

That February Aunt Mai's son Shore, "my boy Shore," the heir to Embley, now aged fourteen, came to convalesce at Embley after measles. She looked after Shore entirely and had a month of freedom from shameful visions. "While he is with me all that is mine is his," she wrote to Aunt Hannah in February, 1845, "my head and hands and time." With Shore she took little walks on the gravel paths, hunted for snowdrops, read aloud and had "a great deal of conversation about dogs." At night, when she had put him to bed and given him his medicine, they had serious talks. She "warned him against lying long in bed, and the temptations of the world, liking to be praised and admired and a general favourite more than anything else and we were both very much affected."

In March, Shore went home, and the Nightingales started once more on their round, up to London, back to Embley for parties in June, up to the North for July and August, back to Embley again for the shooting, up to London in November, back again to Embley at Christmas time. And as week followed week, Florence became more wretchedly unhappy. Nearly a year had passed since her interview with Dr. Howe, and she was no farther forward; eight years had passed since her "call," and not merely had she accomplished nothing, she had slipped backwards---she had lost the sense of walking with God. In private notes, in enormous letters to Aunt Hannah, she reproached herself with frantic bitterness. Again the strain was too great. Though she went with her family to London in February, as soon as she arrived she was ill. On March 1, 1845, she was in bed in the Burlington Hotel, suffering from bronchitis, unable to go anywhere and writing to Clarkey in deep depression. Outside was thick yellow fog; candles were lighted though it was only two in the afternoon, but in spite of them and a large fire the fog hung in the room. Clarkey had suggested that she should express herself through writing, but she had no desire to write. She wanted to act, to work, to perform deeds. "You ask me why I do not write something. . . . I had so much rather live than write---writing is only a substitute for living. . . . I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results."

Before she left London in the spring of this year, she received a shattering blow: Henry Nicholson proposed and insisted on a definite answer. She refused him. Henry was heartbroken, and the Nicholsons were furious. Florence had, they said with justice, encouraged Henry; Marianne ended her friendship with Florence, and the Nightingales and the Nicholsons ceased to be intimate. To Florence the loss of Marianne was a catastrophe; through the summer she suffered tortures. "I have walked up and down all these long summer evenings in the garden," she wrote to Hilary in July, "and could find no words but 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me.'" She did not blame Marianne; she wrote no recriminations; she blamed only herself. "I was not a worthy friend for her. I was not true either to her or to myself in our friendship. I was afraid of her: that is the truth."

Embley was especially full of visitors during the summer. At Whitsuntide Fanny had had a large party, "the picked and chosen of society assembled," she wrote triumphantly to Clarkey. Florence, heartbroken and miserable, moved in a dream. Richard Monckton Milnes, stayed both at Embley and at Broadlands with the Palmerstons during the summer, but she was hardly conscious of him. Nothing was real to her but her suffering over Marianne.

She was approaching a mental collapse when two serious illnesses in the family saved her.

In August she went with her father to visit her grandmother, Mrs. Shore, found her seriously ill, and was allowed to stay and nurse her. Hardly was Mrs. Shore convalescent when Mrs. Gale, the girls' old nurse, was taken ill at Lea Hurst. Again Florence was allowed to nurse Gale, and when she seemed too ill to be moved to Embley at the end of the summer Fanny prepared to give up her winter gaieties and stay at Lea Hurst in order that the old nurse might not be separated from "her children." Gale insisted, however, on being taken to Embley, and there, a week or so later, she died, sitting upright in her chair with Florence beside her holding her hand.

For a short time Florence and her mother drew closer; her heart was melted by Fanny's kindness, and one of the few intimate letters she ever wrote to her mother described Gale's death: "Did I tell you one night she was very suffering and I was doubting whether I should speak to her, something good about the weary and heavy laden, when she said quite distinctly 'Oh I was so well, quite well till now, but I've been sadly off my teas and breakfasts of late.' Oh my dear Mum, life is nothing so much as profoundly ridiculous after all. Is that what the eternal spirit is talking about, when it is with the other invisible spirits on the eve of becoming like them?" The old nurse's last words, Florence Wrote to Hilary, were to say sharply, "Hannah, get to your work." The details of her funeral had been discussed fully by Gale during her illness. She was to be carried across the common, "not over the stiles"; everyone on the estate came in a clean smock, and Mr. Hogg, the steward, said he was sure Mrs. Gale would have enjoyed it very much.

These two episodes brought a certain amount of emancipation. Since Florence had proved herself entirely capable in nursing her grandmother and Gale, it was difficult to forbid her to continue to nurse. In the autumn there was an unusual amount of sickness in the village of Wellow, and she took an active part. She mentions being present at two deathbeds and a difficult birth.

And now she moved forward another step---she realized the necessity of training in nursing. The discovery came as a shock. Neither she herself nor anyone else she had ever met had been taught how to nurse. It was universally assumed that the only qualification needed for taking care of the sick was to be a woman. Ignorance was complete, and its consequences disastrous. "I saw a poor woman die before my eyes this summer because there was nothing but fools to sit up with her, who poisoned her as much as if they had given her arsenic," she wrote to Hilary Bonham Carter in December, 1845.

In 1844, when she first knew with certainty that her vocation lay among the sick in hospitals, she had not had the actual practice of nursing in her mind. She had spoken to Dr. Howe of "devoting herself to works of charity in hospitals." She too had thought that the qualities needed to relieve the misery of the sick were tenderness, sympathy, goodness, and patience. Now her short experience had already shown her that only knowledge and expert skill brought relief; and her destiny, which was to lighten the load of suffering, could be fulfilled only if she were armed with knowledge. She must learn how to nurse. How could she learn? There was perhaps one avenue by which she might succeed.

The idea was bold, but since she had achieved a little independence, she had been becoming bolder. Her plan was to persuade her parents to allow her to go for three months to Salisbury Infirmary to learn nursing: Salisbury was only a few miles from Embley, the Infirmary was a well-known hospital, and the head physician, Dr. Fowler, was an old friend. He held advanced views, and she thought he might support her.

In December, 1845, the Fowlers came to stay at Embley, and Florence proposed her plan. A storm burst. "Mama was terrified," she wrote to Hilary. The reason was "not the physically revolting parts of a hospital but things about the surgeons and nurses which you may guess." Parthe had hysterics. Florence persisted, and her mother's terror passed into furious anger. Writing twenty years later, Miss Nightingale described a series of scenes. Fanny accused her of having "an attachment of which she was ashamed," a secret love affair with some "low vulgar surgeon." In floods of tears Fanny wept that Florence wanted to "disgrace herself."

The Fowlers, embarrassed, "threw cold water." W. F. N., coldly disgusted, went away to London. Was it for this he had educated a charming daughter? Was this to be the end of the Latin and the Greek, the poetry and the philosophy, the Italian tour and the Paris frocks? Hilary described meeting him at a dinner-party a few days later. It had been hoped he would give them inside political news---there was a Cabinet crisis and he was known to have seen Palmerston. But he was morose and would talk of nothing but spoiled and ungrateful daughters and forecast the very worst future for a race at the mercy of the modern girl. Florence was left defeated, helpless, hopelessly depressed. "No advantage that I can see comes of my living on, excepting that one becomes less and less of a young lady every year," she wrote to Hilary Bonham Carter. "You will laugh dear, at the whole plan I daresay; but no one but the mother of it knows how precious an infant idea becomes; nor how the soul dies, between the destruction of one and the taking up of another. I shall never do anything and am worse than dust and nothing. . . . Oh for some strong thing to sweep this loathsome life into the past."

IT WAS NOT SURPRISING that the Nightingales were horror struck. In 1845 hospitals were places of wretchedness, degradation, and squalor. "Hospital smell," the result of dirt and lack of sanitation, was accepted as unavoidable and was commonly so overpowering that persons entering the wards for the first time were seized with nausea. Wards were usually large, bare, and gloomy. Beds were crammed in, fifty or sixty, less than two feet apart. Even decency was impossible. Fifteen years later, when some improvement had been made, Miss Nightingale wrote in Notes on Hospitals: "The floors were made of ordinary wood which, owing to lack of cleaning and lack of sanitary conveniences for the patients' use, had become saturated with organic matter, which when washed gave off the smell of something quite other than soap and water." Walls and ceilings were "of common plaster" also "saturated with impurity." Heating was supplied by a single fire at the end of each ward, and in winter, windows were kept closed for warmth, sometimes for months at a time. In some hospitals half the windows were boarded up in winter. After a time the smell became "sickening," walls streamed with moisture, and "a minute vegetation appeared." The remedy for this was "frequent lime washing with scraping," but the workmen engaged in the task "frequently become seriously ill."

The patients came from the slum tenements called "rookeries," from hovels, from cellars where cholera lurked. Gin and brandy were smuggled into the wards, and fearful scenes took place, ending by half-dying creatures attacking each other in frenzy or writhing in fits of the "screaming horrors." In certain hospitals it was not unknown for the police to be called in to restore order.

The sick came into hospital filthy and remained filthy. In 1854 Miss Nightingale wrote: "The nurses did not as a general rule wash patients, they could never wash their feet---and it was with difficulty and only in great haste that they could have a drop of water, just to dab their hands and face. The beds on which the patients lay were dirty. It was common practice to put a new patient into the same sheets used by the last occupant of the bed, and mattresses were generally of flock sodden and seldom if ever cleaned."

Yet physically disgusting conditions were not the real obstacle to her scheme; the insuperable objection was the notorious immorality of hospital nurses, "It was preferred," wrote Miss Nightingale, "that the nurses should be women who had lost their characters, i.e. should have had one child." It was common for nurses to sleep in the wards they nursed, and not unknown for nurses of male wards to sleep in the wards with the men. In a letter written on May 29, 1854, she described the sleeping accommodation provided for nurses in one of London's most famous hospitals. "The nurses . . . slept in wooden cages on the landing places outside the doors of the wards, where it was impossible for any woman of character to sleep, where it was impossible for the Night Nurse taking her rest in the day to sleep at all owing to the noise, where there was not light or air." The nurse had no other home than the ward; there she lived, slept, and frequently cooked her meals. Discipline and supervision were almost non-existent. A very large number of patients were under the charge of one nurse---in one case a single night nurse had charge of four wards. The level of decency among the patients was almost unbelievably low.

Drink was the curse of the hospital nurse, as of the patients. "The nurses are all drunkards, sisters and all," said the physician of a large London Hospital in 1851, "and there are but two nurses whom the surgeons can trust to give the patients their medicine." In 1854 the head nurse of a London hospital told Miss Nightingale that "in the course of her large experience she had never known a nurse who was not drunken, and there was immoral conduct practised in the very wards, of which she gave me some awful examples."

Miss Nightingale herself nursed a nurse who alternated nursing with prostitution. Mrs. Gaskell, writing to Catherine Winkworth on October 20th, 1854, repeated the story.. 'T. N. undressed the woman, who was half tipsy and kept saying, 'You would not think it Ma'am but a week ago I was in silk and satins dancing at Woolwich. Yes Ma'am for all I am so dirty I am draped in silk and satins sometimes. Real French silk and satins.' This woman was a nurse earning her five guineas a week nursing ladies."

One of the extraordinary features of Miss Nightingale's life is the passage of time. She starts with a "call" in 1837. But what has she been called to do? What is her vocation to be? Eight years pass before, in 1845, she finds out. Even then she is only half-way. Eight more years pass before she gains freedom in 1853 to pursue her vocation. Sixteen years in all, sixteen years during which the eager susceptible girl was slowly hammered into the steely powerful woman of genius. The last eight years, the years after her failure in 1845, were years in which suffering piled on suffering, frustration followed frustration, until she was brought to the verge of madness.

Yet she endured year after year. She had the capacity to assert herself, but she did not. The bonds which bound her were only of straw, but she did not break them. Her temperament held her a prisoner. She could act only when she felt moral justification, and she felt no moral justification. Her sense of guilt trapped her. She was convinced that the difficulties which confronted her were God's punishment for her sinfulness; she was unworthy, and by being unworthy she had brought her sufferings on her own head. "Bless me, too, as poor Esau said," she wrote to Aunt Hannah on Christmas Eve, 1845, "1 have so felt with him and cried with an exceeding bitter cry 'Bless me, even me also, Oh my father,' but he never has yet and I have not deserved that He should."

At the end of 1845, she "went down into the depths. My misery and vacuity were indescribable." Humiliated, snubbed, lonely, she found relief in writing private notes. On page after page, in tens of thousands of words, she poured out her wretchedness, her fear, and her frustration. "This morning I felt as if my soul would pass away in tears, in utter loneliness in a bitter passion of tears and agony of solitude." "I cannot live---forgive me, oh Lord, and let me die, this day let me die." "The day of personal hopes and fears is over for me, now I dread and desire no more." "The sorrows of Hell compass me about, pray God He will not leave my soul in Hell." "The plough goes over the soul."

She spent her nights sleepless, wrestling with her soul, seeking with tears and prayers to make herself worthy to receive the kindness of God; she spent her days performing the duties of the daughter at home.

"My life was not painful, but tiresome," she wrote in a reminiscence thirty years later. W. E. N. liked his two daughters to sit with him in the library after breakfast while he went through The Times, reading aloud anything that struck him as good. "To hear little disjointed bits read out to us out of book or newspaper! Now for Parthe the morning's reading did not matter; she went on with her drawing; but for me, who had no such cover, the thing was boring to desperation." "What is my business in this world and what have I done this fortnight? " she wrote on July 7, 1846. "1 have read the 'Daughter at Home' to Father and two chapters of Mackintosh; a volume of Sybil to Mamma. Learnt seven tunes by heart. Written various letters. Ridden with Papa. Paid eight visits. Done Company. And that is all."

"Dreaming" enslaved her more and more. While W. E. N. was reading The Times, while she was making conversation with visitors or taking "a little drive" with Fanny, she escaped into a dream world. Her dreams centered upon Richard Monckton Milnes. She imagined herself married to him, performing heroic deeds with him.

Yet, in spite of her wretchedness, she was making progress. The philosophy which told her to submit did not tell her to relinquish her determination; indeed, it gave her strength to persist, since she believed that as soon as she had attained a worthy state she would be released from submission. She began to equip herself with knowledge against that day.

At Lord Ashley's suggestion she started to study Blue Books and hospital reports---during the past few years the first Blue Books dealing with public health had been published. In 1838, Dr. Southwood Smith, Dr. Arnott, and Dr. Kay presented their report on the condition of the poor in East London to the Poor Law Commissioners. Two years later the Select Committee presented its first report on the Health of Towns. In 1842, the first report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes was published, and in 1844 the first report of the Health of Towns Commission.

She worked in secret. She got up before dawn and wrote by candlelight, wrapped in a shawl. Notebook after notebook was filled with a mass of facts, compared, indexed, and tabulated. She wrote privately for reports to M. Mohl in Paris; she procured information on hospitals in Berlin from the Bunsens. In the cold dark mornings she laid the foundation of the vast and detailed knowledge of sanitary conditions which was to make her the first expert in Europe. Then the breakfast bell rang, and she came down to be the Daughter at Home.

Fanny had put her in charge of still-room, pantry, and linen-room.

"I am up to my chin in linen, glass and china," she wrote to Clarkey in December, 1846, "and I am very fond of housekeeping. In this too highly educated, too-little-active age, it is at least a practical application of our theories to something---and yet in the middle of my lists, my green lists, brown lists, red lists, of all my instruments of the ornamental in culinary accomplishments, which I cannot even divine the use of, I cannot help asking in my head, 'Can reasonable people want all this?' . . . And a proper stupid answer you'll get,' says the best Versailles service, 'so go and do your accounts; there is one of us cracked.' "

Twice a year she went through linen-room, plate-chest, china and glass cupboard, and storeroom, checking, listing damage, replacements, and repairs. In the still-room she supervised preserving, and she wrote to Hilary Bonham Carter in September, 1846 that after a hard day's work she was "surveying fifty-six jam pots with the eye of an artist."

So month followed month---it seemed without progress or event, but in her character a profound change was taking place. "I feel," she wrote in a private note of 1846, "as if all my being were gradually drawing together to one point." She decided that her longing for affection, her susceptibility were too powerful for safety and she began deliberately to detach herself from human relationships. Love, marriage, even friendship, must be renounced. So in September, 1846 she wrote to Hilary Bonham Carter: "Are not one's earthly friends too often Atalanta's apple, thrown in each other's way to hinder that course, at the end of which is laid up the crown of righteousness? So, dearest, it is well that we should not see too much of each other. . . . Farewell my beloved one." In a private note she wrote: "Oh God, no more love. No more marriage O God."

In July the Nightingales had gone north to Lea Hurst, and in the cottages she found peace. In a private note written on July 16 she wrote: "Rubbed Mrs. Spence for the 2nd time. I am such a creeping worm that if I have anything of the kind to do I can do without marriage or intellect or social intercourse or any of the things people sigh after. . . . I want nothing else, my heart is filled. I am at home."

In October the Chevalier Bunsen sent her the Year Book of the Institution of Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth. Four years earlier he had mentioned Kaiserswerth, but she had not then reached the knowledge that nursing was her vocation. Now with overwhelming joy she realized that Kaiserswerth was what she had been seeking. There she could have training in nursing, and the objections raised against English hospitals did not apply. The religious atmosphere, the ascetic discipline placed the nurses above suspicion. On October 7 she wrote in a private note: "There is my home, there are my brothers and sisters all at work. There my heart is and there, I trust, will one day be my body."

The Year Book became her treasure, but she did not dare mention Kaiserswerth to her mother. Fanny was busier, more successful than ever, and Embley was filled for autumn parties; and so, she wrote in a private note, whenever she wanted "refreshment in the midst of this table d'hôte of people at Embley" she. went upstairs and secretly read the Year Book of the Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth.

In June, 1847, the Nightingales went to Oxford for the meeting of the British Association, and Richard Monckton Milnes went with them. The weather was perfect, the flowering acacias out everywhere, and Florence told Clarkey that she had "never imagined so much loveliness and learning." She strolled through college gardens and cloisters with Richard, and in New College cloister she picked a white rose to press "for a remembrance." They went to lunch at Christ Church with Professor Buckland, the famous naturalist, who kept animals at liberty in his rooms. Florence "invited a Bear of 3 months old in to lunch, who climbed like a squirrel for the butter on the table . . . which went to his head and he became obstreperous. Mr. Buckland put on his cap and gown and rebuked it, at which it became violent and was carried out in disgrace. . . . When we came out it was still walking and storming and howling on its hind legs---gesticulating and remonstrating. I spoke to it but Papa pulled me away, fearing it would bite. I said 'Let alone, I'm going to mesmerise it.' Mr. Milnes followed the suggestion and, in 1/2 minute the little bear began to yawn, in less than 3 min. was stretched fast asleep on the gravel."

From Oxford W. E. N. and Florence went on to pay visits to Lord and Lady Sherborne and Lord and Lady Lovelace. Lady Lovelace, who was Byron's daughter, had a "passion" for Florence and handed round a set of verses she had written in praise of her "soft and silver voice," her "grave and lucid eye."

And Florence persisted in being steadily more miserable. The old story repeated itself: she feared success because she enjoyed it too much; "vanity, love of display, love of glory" were still her besetting sins. "Everything I do is poisoned by the fear that I am not doing it in simplicity and godly sincerity," she wrote.

In September Clarkey married Julius Mohl, and Florence wrote her a long confused letter on the subject of marriage: ". . . We must all take Sappho's leap, one way or other, before we attain to her repose---though some take it to death and some to marriage and some again to a new life even in this world. Which of them is the better part, God only knows. Popular prejudice gives it in favour of marriage. . . . In single life, the stage of the Present and the Outward World is so filled with phantoms, the phantoms, not unreal tho' intangible, of Vague Remorse, Tears, dwelling on the threshold of every thing we undertake alone, Dissatisfaction with what is, and Restless Yearnings for what is not . . . love laying to sleep those phantoms (by assuring us of a love so great that we may lay aside all care for our own happiness . . . because it is of so much consequence to another) gives that leisure frame to our mind, which opens it at once to joy."

Her destiny may have demanded that marriage should be put behind her, but the desire to be loved died hard. She could not rid her heart of longing for "a love so great that we may lay aside all care for our own happiness . . . because it is of so much consequence to another." Nor could she bring herself to face losing Richard Monckton Milnes. Month after month she temporized, evading the moment when she must give him a definite answer. Fanny passed from impatience to anger, accusing her of godless ingratitude, perversity, and conceit.

At this point Florence found consolation in a new friend. The previous autumn, through Clarkey, she had met Selina Bracebridge, wife of Charles Holte Bracebridge, of Atherstone Hall, near Coventry. Selina understood her. In a retrospect Miss Nightingale wrote: "She never told me life was fair and my share of its blessings great and that I ought to be happy. She did not know that I was miserable but she felt it; and to me, young, strong and blooming as I then was, to me, the idol of the man I adored, the spoilt child of fortune, she had the heart and the instinct to say---'Earth, my child, has a grave and in heaven there is rest.' " Selina and her husband became family friends, and she was given a pet name by the Nightingales, the Creek character "sigma"---S---partly in compliment to the Hellenic traits of her character, partly in reference to her love for Greece.

Through the spring of 1847 Florence had a new dream. She imagined was always with her, always waiting for her, beautiful, kind, and loving. She wrote imaginary dialogues in which she put down Σ's part in the conversation as well as her own. The dialogues were never sent; they were too private to be read even by Σ. She feared again for her mental balance. All round her she could see the effects of enforced idleness and frustration---"I see so many of my kind who have gone mad for want of something to do. People who might have been so happy, Aunt Evans, Aunt Patty," she wrote. Would she wake up one day to find she was elderly and mad and subject, like Aunt Patty, to "outbursts"?

In the autumn of 1847 she broke down completely. She wrote to Clarkey that she could not face "the prospect of three winter months of perpetual row." She collapsed, took to her bed, coughed.

She was rescued by the Bracebridges, who were going to spend the winter in Rome; Σ persuaded Fanny to let them take Florence. The fuss was enormous: the clothes she was to take, the books she was to read, the sights she was to see, were separately the subject of consideration, reconsideration, letters, interviews, advice from uncles, aunts, grandmothers, and cousins. Solemn farewells were said. Parthe was overcome at the idea of separation, and for the last few days Fanny and W. E. N. withdrew from Embley and left the two sisters alone. Florence was apathetic. "Dreaming" had enslaved her even further during her illness, and she was terrified. In a private note she wrote: "I see nothing desirable but death."

On October 27 the party left England, going overland to Marseilles and thence by sea to Civita Vecchia, the port for Rome.

"Oh how happy I was! I never enjoyed any time in my life as much as my time in Rome," Miss Nightingale wrote. Fifty years later she could still describe every street, every turning, every building in minute detail. One of the great moments of her life was her first sight of the Michelangelo ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. "I did not think I was looking at pictures but straight into Heaven itself," she wrote to Parthe on December 17, 1847. She remained alone in the Sistine for the whole of one day and for the rest of her life had prints of the Sistine frescoes hanging in her room.

She danced out the old year of 1847 into 1848, and it was "the happiest New Year I have ever spent." In January she wrote: "This is the most entire and unbroken freedom from dreaming that I ever had." Her health recovered, and she was well all the six months she was in Rome.

And in Rome, during the winter of 1847, she met Sidney Herbert. Their strange and fatal intimacy began in picture galleries and churches, during strolls in the Borghese gardens and sightseeing expeditions to Tivoli. Each was destined to exercise an extraordinary influence on the other; each in meeting the other had met his and her fate; but no portent indicated that this was the most important moment of their lives. The acquaintance opened with Florence's introduction by Σ to Sidney Herbert's wife, a remarkably beautiful girl who was a close friend, "almost like a daughter," to Σ. She had recently married Sidney Herbert, half-brother and heir presumptive of the Earl of Pembroke, and they were now wintering in Rome in the course of a postponed wedding tour. She was immediately attracted by Florence, and they became intimate friends.

Liz was a woman of great charm. She was beautiful, with brilliant dark eyes and a glowing olive skin. She had a childlike eagerness, a simple power of enjoyment which made her a delightful companion. After knowing her for a few weeks, Miss Nightingale wrote in a private note of "the great kindness, the desire of love, the magnanimous generosity" which distinguished her character.

Fate had heaped blessing upon blessing on Sidney Herbert's head. He was astonishingly good-looking---"a tall and graceful figure surmounted by a face of such singular sweetness as to be unforgettable," wrote Gladstone. His hair was thick, waving and dark chestnut in color, his eyes dark and shaded with long lashes. Tall, broad-shouldered yet graceful, he was a superb shot, a remarkably good horseman, and an ardent rider to hounds. He had great wealth; he lived at Wilton, one of the most beautiful houses in England which he would eventually inherit; he had a house in Belgrave Square and vast estates in Ireland and Scotland. He was brilliantly clever; his wit and social talents were famous; yet he secretly belonged to an association the members of which were pledged to give away a large part of their incomes in private charity.

And yet---with so much goodness, brilliance, and beauty he was without zest for life. Parliamentary success and philanthropic achievements were dust and ashes in his mouth, and in spite of his gifts, his capacity for bestowing happiness, and his good fortune, he would have preferred never to have lived at all. He longed only for quiet---the peace of Wilton. "There is not a spot about Wilton which I do not love as if it were a person," he wrote. "If one had nothing to do but consult one's own taste and one's own ease I should be too glad to live down here a domestic life."

It was impossible. Fate heaped on him glittering prize after glittering prize. Riches, high office, power, responsibility, descended on him. He found the burden almost intolerable and turned for consolation to religion---both Sidney Herbert and his wife were devout Christians who consecrated their lives to philanthropic works. He built a new church at Wilton, he worked to improve the condition of the poor, he was in process of building and endowing a convalescent home, he was interested in a plan for emigrating sweated workers, and into these and other plans Liz threw herself heart and soul, worshiping her husband and desiring to share his every activity and thought.

In Rome the Herberts had a small circle of friends who met almost daily. One was Doctor Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester, who was wintering in Rome to improve his health, which had broken down under the stress of religious doubts; another was Mary Stanley, sister of Doctor Stanley, then Canon of Canterbury, later famous as Dean Stanley of Westminster. It was the time when the Oxford Movement was shaking the Church of England to its foundations, and the Herberts and their friends belonged to the reforming High Church party, popularly called Puseyites. Would the path which they were following lead them to the Roman Catholic Church? To help them decide this point, they had come to Rome. Miss Nightingale, however, was indifferent. She formed a friendship with Mary Stanley because Mary Stanley was interested in nursing and had visited hospitals in England and Europe, and Mary Stanley developed a "passion" for her. With Manning and with Sidney Herbert she discussed social work and schemes of philanthropy. Religious doctrines or the claims of one church against another meant nothing to her.

In April, 1848 she left Rome. The city was in arms again, and Garibaldi was riding into Rome to defend the city against the Austrians. She heard with indignation the suggestion that Rome should be surrendered without a blow in order that its monuments might be preserved. "They must carry out their defence to the last," she wrote to Clarkey. "I should like to see them fight the streets, inch by inch, till the last man dies at his barricade, till St. Peter's is level with the ground, till the Vatican is blown into the air. . . . If I were in Rome I should be the first to fire the Sistine . . . and Michael Angelo would cry 'Well done' as he saw his work destroyed."

She reached home to find Fanny and Parthe occupied by the excitement and fuss of a family wedding: Laura Nicholson, Marianne's youngest sister, married Jack Bonham Carter, Hilary's eldest brother. The celebrations, in the Waverley manner, were colossal. Goodwill was in the air, differences were forgotten, and Florence and Parthe were bridesmaids.

Her friendship with the Herberts, a source of profound satisfaction to Fanny, grew closer. As soon as they returned to London in May, she dined with them. The next month she went with them to the opening of their convalescent home at Charmouth, staying at Wilton on her way back. She met a circle of intelligent, socially impeccable, extremely influential people intensely interested in hospital reform. Public opinion was awakening; the Herberts and their friends were eager for information, and Miss Nightingale, who had now been working for more than five years collecting facts on public health and hospitals, had an enormous mass of detailed information at her finger tips. She gradually became known as an expert on hospitals.

The Herberts knew of her plan to go to Kaiserswerth and approved, and the Bunsens were thinking of sending their daughter there. Once more the fulfillment of her desires sires seemed within the range of possibility. Who could disapprove of what the Herberts and the Bunsens approved? Surely her mother must allow herself to be convinced. But it was necessary to proceed cautiously---the very word "hospital" might be fatal.

In September, 1848, a heaven-sent opportunity offered. Parthe was ordered to take a cure at Carlsbad, and the Nightingales planned to go on to Frankfurt, where Clarkey and her husband M. Mohl were staying. Kaiserswerth being near Frankfurt, Florence's plan was to leave her family for a week or two to "visit the deaconnesses and perhaps fit in a little training."

But 1848 was the year of revolution in Europe. When disorders broke out in Frankfurt, W. E. N. thought it wiser to stay in England; and the Nightingales went to Malvern instead of Carlsbad. "All that I most wanted to do at Kaiserswerth lay for the first time within reach of my mouth, and the ripe plum has dropped." Miss Nightingale wrote to Clarkey in October.

Her reaction was violent. Her mother was not concerned, for Fanny knew nothing of the scheme. It was God Himself who had prevented her. God who had cut her off from Kaiserswerth, perhaps for years. The old reasoning tortured her. This misfortune had come upon her because she was sinful. God wanted her to go to Kaiserswerth, but He could not let her go until she had reached a greater state of worthiness. She went down into the depths of depression; the short period of comparative happiness was over. She "hated God to hear her laugh as if she had not repented of her sin." The winter season at Embley lay before her. "My God what am I to do," she wrote in a private note of October, 1848. "Teach me, tell me. I cannot go on any longer waiting till my situation should change, dreaming what the change should be."

She dreamed of fame, of Richard Monckton Milnes. To escape from "dreaming," she sought relief in nursing the poor of Wellow, the village near Embley, and Fanny and Parthe became irritated. W. E. N., who hated dirt, disease, and ugliness, was disgusted. He told Florence she was being theatrical; if she wanted something to do, let her work in the school at Wellow. She did for a time, but she failed. "I was disgusted with my utter impotence," she wrote in a private note. "I made no improvement. I obtained no influence. . . . Why should I? . . . Education I know is not my genius."

Aunt Hannah wrote soothingly that anything, even a house-party or a dinner, can be done to the glory of God. "How can it be to the glory of God," answered Florence, "when there is so much misery in the world which we might be curing instead of living in luxury." Aunt Hannah, who did not pay her usual visit to Embley in 1848, did not answer: Florence was becoming known as a rebel daughter, and Aunt Hannah could not countenance that. The following year she wrote that she found it necessary with "advancing years and delicate health" to "confine herself to visits to near relatives," and her correspondence with Florence ceased.

In March, 1849, the Nightingales went to London for the season. Miss Nightingale was in a mounting delirium of misery and frustration. "Dreaming" became uncontrollable. She fell into trances in which hours were blotted out; she lost sense of time and place against her will. In daily life she moved like an automaton, could not remember what had been said or even where she had been. Agonies of guilt and self-reproach were intensified by the conviction that her worst fears were being realized and that she was going insane.

Again and again she made resolutions to end dreaming, to "tear the sin out," to "stamp it out"---but they were always broken. She turned on herself with savagery, hating herself, despising her weakness. She would have killed herself if she had not thought it mortal sin. On June 7, 1849, she determined at whatever cost to herself to "crucify" her sin. The 7th of each month was devoted to self-examination because she had received her "call" on February 7. In this wretched state another blow fell on her. Richard Monckton Milnes would be put off no longer. He insisted on a definite answer---would she marry him or not? She refused him.

It was an act which required extraordinary courage. She was deeply stirred by him; she called him "the man I adored"; and she renounced him for the sake of a destiny which it seemed impossible she would ever fulfill.

In a private note she analyzed her reasons. She wrote several versions; she began it, broke off, returned to it again before she could clarify her emotions. I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction and that would find it in him. I have a passionate nature which requires satisfaction and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active, nature which requires satisfaction and that would not find it in his life. Sometimes I think I will satisfy my passional nature at all events, because that will at least secure me from the evil of dreaming. But would it? I could be satisfied to spend a life with him in combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things."

But she could not always be rational. She wrote again with a pencil that trembled, hesitated, and dug itself into the paper. "I do not understand it. . . . I am ashamed to understand it. . . . I know that if I were to see him again . . . the very thought of doing so quite overcomes me. I know that since I refused him not one day has passed without my thinking of him, that life is desolate without his sympathy." At night she dreamed of him. He came and told her that he had arranged for her to go to Kaiserswerth. And yet desperately as she longed for him, she would not give way. "I know I could not bear his life," she wrote, "that to be nailed to a continuation, an exaggeration of my present life without hope of another would be intolerable to me---that voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide."

Fanny was severely disappointed and furiously resentful. Her obstinacy hardened; she determined that Florence should not have her own ungrateful way, and what had begun as genuine maternal solicitude for her daughter's welfare turned into a contest of wills in which love and kindness were forgotten.

By the autumn Miss Nightingale's mental and physical state was pitiable. She was far from well and fainted on several occasions; sometimes her mind became a blank and she looked at people wildly and vaguely, not hearing what was said to her. Σ once more intervened. The Bracebridges were going to Egypt and then to Greece, and they persuaded Fanny to let them take Florence. But the Nightingale circle disapproved. "I think you are all martyrs for having consented," wrote Ellen Tollet, Parthe's favorite cousin. "I suppose really large minded people think less of space and distance than we do," commented another. Aunt Patty Smith wrote acidly that "it was to be hoped that change of air and the satisfaction of doing her duty would do Flo good."

Miss Nightingale herself commented to Hilary Bonham Carter that as Rome had done her some good the family were going to send her farther afield in the hopes that that would be even better.

A journey to Egypt was an adventure in 1849. But she was in a state when Egypt, the desert, even the brilliant landscapes of the Nile itself meant as little as scenes painted on a backcloth. She was on the verge of mental collapse.

In a small black notebook she recorded her secret agonies; the entries are scribbled in pencil, in phrases which repeat themselves, in writing which wavers and becomes all but indecipherable. The weight of guilt laid on her conscience by "dreaming" was driving her insane.

Jan. 26.	Went with party to Jenab . . . but I spoiled it all with dreaming. Disappointed with myself and the effect of Egypt on me. Rome was better.
Feb. 16.	Where was I all the while---dreaming. Karnak itself cannot save me now.
Feb. 22.	God spoke to me again, sitting on the steps of the portico at Karnak.
March 3.	Ill. Did not get up in the morning.
March 7.	God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for Him, for Him alone without the reputation.
March 9.	During half an hour I had by myself in my cabin, settled the question with God.
March 15.	God has delivered me from the great offence and the constant murderer of all my thoughts.
March 21.	Undisturbed by my great enemy.
April 1 .	Not able to go out but wished God to have it all His own way. I like Him to do exactly as He likes without even telling me the reason.
May 7.	(In Athens) I have felt here the suspension of all my faculties, I could not write, could not read. . . .
May 9.	I cannot even draw a pattern for a few minutes without turning faint.
May 12.	To-day I am 30---the age Christ began his mission. Now no more childish things. No more love. No more marriage. Now Lord let me think only of Thy Will, what Thou willest me to do. Oh Lord Thy Will, Thy Will.
May 18.	To-morrow is Sacrament Sunday; I have read over all my history, a history of miserable woe, mistake, and blinding vanity, of seeking great things for myself.
May 19.	Whit Sunday. Oh how happy I am to be away from the scene of temptation on this day. I thank Thee Father, three Whitsuntides have I spent torn with temptation and overcome. Here I am not safe. God I place myself in Thy Hands . . . if it be Thy Will that I should go on suffering let it be so.
May 21.	(Ill.) Now I am 30, the year when I thought I should have accomplished my Kaiserswerth mission . . . let me only accomplish the Will of God, let me not desire great things for myself.
June 7.	1 thought I would go up the Eumenides cave and ask God there to explain to me what were these Eumenides which pursued me. I would not ask to be released from them---Welcome Eumenides---but to be delivered from doing further wrong. . . . This day twelve months ago June 7th 1849 I made that desperate effort, that crucifixion of the sin, in faith that it would cure me. Oh what is crucifixion---would I not joyfully submit to crucifixion, Father, to be rid of this. But this long moral death, this failure of all attempts to cure. What does it signify to me now whether I see this or do that? I never can be sure of seeing it. I may see nothing but my own self practicing an attitude.
June 10.	The Lord spoke to me; he said "Give five minutes every hour to the thought of me. Couldst thou but love Me as Lizzie loves her husband, how happy wouldst thou be." But Lizzie does not give five minutes every hour to the thought of her husband, she thinks of him every minute, spontaneously.
June 12.	To Megara. Alas it little matters where I go---sold as I am to the enemy---whether in Athens or in London, it is all one to me.
June 17.	After a sleepless night physically and morally ill and broken down, a slave-glad to leave Athens. I had no wish on earth but to sleep. . . .
June 18.	I had no wish to be on deck. I let all the glorious sunrises, the gorgeous sunsets, the lovely moonlights pass by. I had no wish, no energy, I longed but for sleep. . . . My enemy is too strong for me, everything has been tried. . . . All, all is in vain.
June 22.	Began to sleep.
June 24.	Here too (Trieste) I was free.
June 29.	Four long days of absolute slavery.
June 30.	[Written faintly and shakily] I cannot write a letter, can do nothing.
July 1.	I lay in bed and called on God to save me.

Again Σ saved her. If Florence continued to be thwarted, she would go out of her mind. Σ acted on her own responsibility. They were to travel home from Greece by land; she chose a route through Prague and Berlin and suggested that she and her husband should spend a fortnight at Düsseldorf while Florence visited Kaiserswerth.

Miss Nightingale was too exhausted, too wretched to be grateful. "On the brink of my accomplishing my greatest wish," she wrote, "with Σ positively planning it for me, I seemed to be unfit, unmanned for it, it seemed to be not the calling for me. . . . I did not feel the spirit, the energy, to do anything at Kaiserswerth." As they traveled from Trieste to Prague and on to Berlin, she wrote that she was "lost and past redemption, a slave that could not be set free."

She found relief in the companionship of animals. On the Nile she had had two little chameleons which slept on her bed and had been "so sorry to part with them, they were such company." She was traveling now with two tortoises, called Mr. and Mrs. Hill in honor of two missionaries at Athens, a cicada named Plato, and Athena, a baby owl, which she had rescued from some Greek boys at the Parthenon. Athena was fierce, and Miss Nightingale had had to mesmerize her according to Richard Monckton Milne's method before she could be persuaded to enter a cage, but she became devoted to her mistress and traveled everywhere in her pocket. At Prague Athena ate Plato.

When Miss Nightingale reached Berlin, she was still miserably depressed. "I had 3 paths among which to choose," she wrote on July 10, 1850. "I might have been a married woman, or a literary woman, or a hospital sister. And now it seemed to me as if quiet with somebody to look for my coming back were all I wanted."

But in Berlin she began visiting hospitals and charitable institutions, and her spirits instantly revived. "All at once I felt how rich life was," she wrote on July 15. On July 31 she reached Kaiserswerth. "With the feeling with which a pilgrim first looks on the Kedron I saw the Rhine dearer to me than the Nile."

She stayed a fortnight. It was a visit of inspection, and she did not nurse but was shown the work of the Institution and helped with the children.

On August 13 she left Kaiserswerth "feeling so brave as if nothing could ever vex me again!' She was well, brimming with vitality, her powers of concentration had returned, and she performed the feat of dashing off a pamphlet of thirty-two pages in less than a week; telling the unwanted women kept in "busy idleness" in England, the women she saw on all sides "going mad for the want of something to do," of work, happiness, and comradeship waiting for them at Kaiserswerth. It was printed in 1851 "by the inmates of the Ragged Colonial School at Westminster" and issued anonymously under the title The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, under the direction of the Rev. Pastor Fliedner, embracing the support and care of a Hospital, Infant and Industrial Schools, and a Female Penitentiary.

On August 21 she reached Lea Hurst and "surprised my dear people, sitting in the drawing-room, with the owl in my pocket. Sat with Mama and Parthe in the nursery. Rode with Papa." Happiness lasted only a few hours. Fanny was furiously angry; the visit to Kaiserswerth was not to be spoken of, was shameful, a disgrace. The old resentments broke out; the old accusations were repeated. Parthe had hysterics; Fanny raged and wept. Florence must be forced to do her duty, made to stay at home, and engage in the pursuits proper to her upbringing and station.

Five years had passed since her attempt to enter Salisbury Infirmary; she was no longer a girl but a woman of thirty, and she had accomplished nothing. Only her determination persisted. "Resignation!" she had written in 1847, "I never understood that word!" A new struggle began, more bitter, more unhappy than ever before.