“It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.
“Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”
The well-remembered words of Ruskin’s appeal to girls in “Sesame and Lilies,” published but a few years earlier, were evidently in Miss Nightingale’s mind when she wrote the closing sentences of her tribute to Agnes Jones—sentences which set their seal upon this volume, and will echo long after it is forgotten.
“Let us,” she writes, “add living flowers to her grave, ‘lilies with full hands,’ not fleeting primroses, nor dying flowers. Let us bring the work of our hands and our heads and our hearts to finish her work which God has so blessed. Let us not merely rest in peace, but let hers be the life which stirs up to fight the good fight against vice and sin and misery and wretchedness, as she did—the call to arms which she was ever obeying:—
‘The Son of God goes forth to war—
Who follows in His train?’
“O daughters of God, are there so few to answer?”