At the same time England was not forgotten.
“I am listening here in Rome,” she wrote, when pleading for the ragged schools of London. Still, though under the clear Italian skies, she can see the ragged, bare-footed, hungry-eyed children begging in the London streets. It is a disgrace to England, she cries; she knows they cannot all be fed and clothed, but—
“Put a thought beneath the rags
To ennoble the heart’s struggle,”
so that by gentle words the children may learn “just the uses of their sorrow.” And again Mrs. Browning’s appeal was not in vain.
One of her last poems was a very sad one, called “Little Mattie.”
Mrs. Browning had, even in Italy, suffered very much from bad health, and in 1861 she died. She was buried beside a grassy wall in the English burial-ground just outside Florence, the city she loved so well, in Italy, “my Italy” as she has called it, the land where Keats and Shelley lie.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (born 1820).
Of the early and private life of Florence Nightingale there is no need to speak, but you should know what good work she has done for her country, how she left her English home to go and nurse the poor soldiers who were wounded in battle in the Crimea, and how well she did the work that she undertook to do. Not only did she work out of England, but in England she has improved some of our hospitals, taught some of our English nurses how to work better, and has made nursing into the happier labour it is now, instead of the drudgery it was too often before.