At other times I have had glimpses of her as her carriage dashed through the gateway to Marlborough House, on a garden-party day, or through the Park, as she was fleeing with all speed from the city, after a Drawing- room. Sometimes, she has bowed right and left, and smiled, as though pleased by the cheers of the people; but at other times she has scarcely inclined her head, and worn a look of unsmiling, utter weariness—proving that a woman may have much worldly goods, many jewels, and brave velvet gowns, and heaps of India shawls, and half a dozen grand mansions, with a throne in every one, and yet at times feel that this brief life of ours is "all vanity and vexation of spirit."
The Queen, though she had not kept up her intimate relations with the Emperor and Empress, was shocked at the utter ruin to them and their son, which resulted from the French and Prussian war, and she was not wanting in tender sympathy, when the poor frightened refugee, Eugenie, hid a tearful face against her sisterly breast, and sobbed out, "I have been too favorable to war." To the Emperor she granted an asylum and a grave.
I know not whether France will ever demand his dust, to give it sepulture under the dome of the Invalides; but he has already on the banks of the Seine the grandest of monuments—Paris. His memory stands fair and firm in stately buildings and massive bridges, and is renewed every year in the plane tree of noble Boulevards, those green longas vias, grander than the military highways of the Caesars.
In 1867 the Prince of Wales fell grievously ill, with the same fearful malady that had deprived him of his father. Intense was the anxiety not only of the Royal Family, but of all the English people the world over. Soon the sympathy of other nations was aroused, and prayers began to ascend to Heaven for the preservation of that precious life, not only from all Christian peoples, but from Hebrews, Mohammedans and Buddhists; in heathen lands the missionaries prayed, and in heathen portions of Christian cities the mission-children prayed, while on the high seas the sailors responded fervently when the captain. read in the Service the "Prayer for the Sick," meaning their Prince, "sick unto death." The fine old boast of England's power, that "her morning drum beats round the world," how poor it seems beside the thought, of this zone of prayer! There had been nothing like this in English history, and there was nothing like it in ours, till that heart-breaking time of the mortal illness of President Garfield. O, worthy should be, the life and manifold the good works of that man for whom so many peoples and tongues have given surety to Heaven by fervent intercessions and supplications.
This long sad time of anxiety and peril drew the Queen out of her sorrow as nothing had done before. She watched tenderly by the bedside of her son, and when he was recovered, and went to St. Paul's to return thanks, she sat by his side, and wore a white flower in her bonnet, and her grateful smile showed that there was a rift in the cloud of her mourning, and that God's sunlight was striking through.
Lord Ronald Gower quotes a letter from his sister, the Duchess of Westminster, describing the Prince and Princess of Wales as she saw them about this time. She said: "He is much thinner and his head shaved, but little changed in his face, and looking so grateful. She looks thin and worn, but so affectionate—tears in her eyes when talking of him, and his manner to her so gentle."
Surely convalescence is a "state of grace." Would that it might always last a lifetime with us!
During this year, Irish disaffection broke out very seriously in the great Fenian movement. An upheaval this, from the lowest stratum of society, with no gentlemen, or eloquent orators, for leaders, but all the more appalling for that. These rough, desperate men meant, as they said, "business." This movement <was suppressed, driven under the surface, but only to break out more appallingly than ever some ten or twelve years later, in brutal assassinations, which have curdled the blood of the world. Ah, must it always be so? Will this tiresome old Celtic Enceladus never lie quiet, and be dead, though the mountain sit upon him ever so solidly, and smoke ever so placidly above him?
Where now, we sadly ask, is the Ireland of Tom Moore, Father Prout, Lover and Lever? Not enough left of it to furnish a new drama for Mr. Boucicault. Donnybrook Fair has given place to midnight conspirations. Fox-hunts to the stalking of landlords—all the jolly old customs extinct, except the "wake." Peasant-life, over there, sometimes seems, at the best, one protracted "wake."
I suppose it is too late now, yet I can but think that if the Queen had built years ago, a palace in Ireland, at Killarney, or in lovely Wicklow, or in Dublin itself, and resided there a part of every year, things might have been better. She was so popular in that "distressful country" when, by frequent visits, she testified an interest in it, and her gentle, motherly presence might have had a more placating influence than any "Coercion bill." The money she would have spent there,—the very crumbs that would have fallen from her table, would have been a benefaction to that poor people.