The vacant place may be.
Adelaide Procter.
Then, then a woman’s low soft sympathy
Comes like an angel’s voice to teach us how to die.
Edwin Arnold.
Before the more heroic elements in Florence Nightingale’s character had been evoked by the events of the Crimean War, her intimate friends had begun to regard her as a woman for whom the future held some great destiny. This was strikingly shown in a poem by Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of Byron, who described the future heroine of the Crimea in a poem entitled A Portrait from Life. She draws the picture of her slender form, her “grave but large and lucid eye,” her “peaceful, placid loveliness,” refers to her love of books, her “soft, silvery voice” and delight in singing sacred songs—
She walks as if on heaven’s brink,
Unscathed through life’s entangled maze—
and in a concluding verse Lady Lovelace makes the following remarkable prophecy:—
In future years in distant climes