It may not be out of place to insert here, as an example of these, what was written out of a full heart on the day of the Princess’ death by the hand which had not yet concluded the task of tracing the “Life of the Prince Consort,” in which the Princess had all along taken the keenest interest. The letters printed in this volume afford the amplest proof of the justice of the estimate which the writer had formed of the gifted and devoted woman whose heart is there laid bare for our study and instruction.
“Oh, sir, the good die first,
And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.”—Wordsworth.
December 14th, 1878.
On the 14th of December, seventeen years ago, a great sorrow fell upon England in the death of the Prince Consort, who, if he did not die too soon for his own happiness and fame, died at least, as all now feel, too soon for England. The memorable 14th of December has again come round, and again a great sorrow has fallen upon the country. The Princess has been taken to her rest, who watched and soothed the Prince Consort in the last days of his fatal illness, and who by her fortitude and noble devotion helped materially, though then but a girl of seventeen, to sustain and comfort the widowed Queen in her measureless affliction. For the first time a breach—and such a breach—has been made in that family circle to which all who had the priviledge to know it looked as the happiest in England—happiest, because mutual love and esteem bound all its members together by ties knit in childhood and never broken, and because of the noble activity for good which had been set before them in the example of their parents kept their hearts fresh and their minds ever open. She who, while yet a girl, was called to play a woman’s part by her father’s deathbed, has been the first to follow him into the Silent Land.
No life could have opened more auspiciously than that of the second daughter of our Royal house.[137] From the first she gave great promise of beauty and of intelligence. The fine old English names of Alice and Maud, selected for her by her happy parents, seemed as names sometimes do, to be particularly fitted to the winning, open character of her fair and finely-formed features, and their sound was one pleasant in the mouths, not only of those to whom she was known, but of the people, as she grew up and was seen in public by the eager and kindly eyes to whom the sight of the Royal children has always been welcome.
When the marriage of the Princess Royal took place in 1858, the Princess Alice was still only a girl of fifteen; but she had already developed qualities of mind and heart of no ordinary kind. She came by degrees to fill up in some measure the vacancy which had been created by the removal of her very gifted sister to Berlin. Naturally she was drawn nearer to the Prince Consort; and the influence of his character and the teachings of his affectionate wisdom sank deeply into her pure and highly intellectual nature. He looked forward to her future with the assurance that she would prove all he could wish a daughter to be. She, on the other hand, loved him with a devotion only tempered by a profound reverence for the great qualities which she could then, perhaps, but dimly appreciate, but the true extent and worth of which her own subsequent experience and reflection taught her more thoroughly to measure. When in later years she spoke of the Prince, one saw that, as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, “she honored his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.”
The teaching of that beloved father was put to the proof in those sad days of patient watching which preceded his death. Things were told at the time of the devotion and the marvellous self-control of the young girl, called so sternly and so suddenly to face death in the person of a father, on whose life that of the Queen herself seemed to depend, and whose counsels she knew to be of inestimable value to the nation. A few days after the Prince’s death, she was spoken of by the Times in these noticeable words: “Of the devotion and strength of mind shown by the Princess Alice all through these trying scenes it is impossible to speak too highly. Her Royal Highness has, indeed, felt that it was her place to be a comfort and a support to her mother in her affliction, and to her dutiful care we may perhaps owe it that the Queen has borne her loss with exemplary resignation, and a composure which, under so sudden and terrible a bereavement, could not have been anticipated.” The knowledge of this fact—and it was a fact—sank deeply into people’s minds. It was never forgotten, and from that day the name of the Princess Alice has been a cherished household word to all her countrymen and women.
When, in 1862, she married the husband of her choice—a man whose sterling worth and manliness had satisfied even the critical judgment of parents jealous for the happiness of a daughter so justly dear—the affectionate good wishes of the Queen’s subjects of all grades went with her to her new home. In that home, brightened and ennobled as it was by her presence, her love for the home and country of her youth burned with a steady and ever-deepening glow. It is only those who know how strong is the mutual love by which the children of Queen Victoria are bound to their parent and to each other, who can appreciate the passionate yearning toward England of the Princesses whose homes have been made elsewhere. England and all its interests held a foremost place in the heart of the Princess Alice; and no one watched more closely every phase of the changeful life of the busy land, which she loved and reverenced as the home of liberty and the pioneer of civilization.
While fulfilling with exemplary devotion every duty as a wife and mother, the process of self-culture was never relaxed. Every refined taste was kept alive by fresh study, fresh practice, fresh observation; neither was any effort spared to keep abreast with all that the best intellects of the time were adding to the stores of invention, of discovery, of observation, and of thought. Each successive year taught her better to estimate the value of the principles in religion, in morals, and in politics in which she had been trained. As her knowledge of the world and of men grew, she could see the wide range of fact upon which they were based, and their fitness as guides amid the perplexing experiences of human life, which, however seemingly varied in different epochs, are ever essentially the same. Then the significance of the Prince Consort’s habit of judging every thing by some governing principle, and working always by strict method, became clear to her; and in a letter written in January 1875, of which a copy is before us, the Princess writes with her accustomed modesty: “Living with thinking and cultivated Germans, much in Papa has explained itself to me, which formerly I could less understand, or did not appreciate so much as I ought to have done.”
She inherited much of her father’s practical good sense, and, like him, was ever ready to take part in any well-directed effort for raising the condition of the toilworn and the poor. How much of their misery, nay, of their evil ways, was due to their wretched habitations, she, like him, felt most keenly; and she gave her sympathy and support to every effort for their improvement. With this view she translated into German some of Miss Octavia Hill’s essays “On the Homes of the London Poor,” and published them with a little preface of her own (to which only her initial A. was affixed), in the hope that the principles, which had been successfully applied in London by Miss Hill and her coadjutors, might be put into action in some of the German cities. No good work appealed to her in vain. The great exemplar of her father was always before her; and in the letter from which we have already quoted she speaks of his life, “spent in the highest aims, and with the noblest conception of duty,” as a “leading star” to her own.