Soon all England was alive to the great work, and more nurses, and large gifts of supplies and money began to be hurried to the Crimea.
Florence Nightingale spent nearly two years in the Crimea. Once she fell dangerously ill with a fever, but the care she had given to others was returned in the form of all manner of attentions to her. She never quite recovered from the effects of that terrible Crimean fever.
When the war was over, she went back to England so quietly that hardly anyone outside her home knew of her return. When it became known, she was overwhelmed by all sorts of people trying to do her honor. Most of them she refused to see. Queen Victoria invited her to come to Balmoral Castle and this honor she could not refuse, for the request of a Queen is a command. The Queen decorated her with a beautiful jewel, treating her simply in the spirit of one woman recognizing another who deserved recognition.
Florence Nightingale lived to be ninety years old, thus spending fifty years in England after the Crimean war.
She devoted all her life to benevolent works: building new hospitals, writing books on the care of the sick, and inspiring many young women to give their lives to the service of humanity. She never married.
At her death it was proposed to bury her in Westminster Abbey, that great final home of England's illustrious sons and daughters, but the honor was declined by her friends, and she sleeps sweetly in the village church-yard near her old country home in Hampshire.
Our own Longfellow wrote these fine lines about Florence Nightingale, referring to her habit of going about the hospitals at night with a lamp in her hand:
"On England's annals through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,
A light its ray shall cast