At the close of the season the sad news arrived of the sudden death from diphtheria of the year-old wife, the young Queen of Portugal.
In August the Queen and the Prince made one of their yachting excursions to the Channel Islands. The Duchess of Kent's seventy-third birthday was kept at Osborne. During the autumn stay of the Court at Balmoral, the Prince presided over the British Association for the Promotion of Science, which met that year at Aberdeen. He afterwards entertained two hundred members of the association, filling four omnibuses, in addition to carriages, at a Highland gathering at Balmoral. The day was cold and showery, but with gleams of sunshine. It is unnecessary to say that the attendance was large, and the games and dancing were conducted with much spirit. In honour of the country, the Prince and his sons appeared in kilts, the Queen and the Princesses in royal Stewart tartan skirts and shawls over black velvet bodices.
In 1859 the Queen made no less than three successful ascents of Highland mountains, Morvem, Lochnagar, and at last Ben Macdhui, the highest mountain in Scotland, upwards of four thousand feet. On the return of the royal party they went from Edinburgh to Loch Katrine, in order to open the Glasgow Waterworks, the conclusion of a great undertaking which was marred not inappropriately by a very wet day. The Queen and the Prince made a detour on their homeward route, as they had occasionally done before, visiting Wales and Lord Penryn at Penryn Castle.
This year saw the publication of a memorable book, "Adam Bede," for which even its precursor, "Scenes from Clerical Life," had not prepared the world of letters. The novel was much admired in the royal circle. In one of the rooms at Osborne, as a pendant to a picture from the "Faery Queen," there hangs a representation from a very different masterpiece in English literature, of the young Squire watching Hetty in the dairy.
In the beginning of winter the Prince suffered from an unusually severe fit of illness. In November the Princess Royal again visited England, accompanied by her husband.
There were cheery winter doings at Osborne, when the great household, like one large family, rejoiced in the seasonable snow, in a slide "used by young and old," and in a "splendid snow man." The new year was joyously danced in, though the children who were wont to assemble at the Queen's dressing-room door to call in chorus "Prosit Neu Jahr," were beginning to be scattered far and wide.
In January, 1860, the Queen opened Parliament in person, when for the first time the Princesses Alice and Helena were present.
On the twentieth anniversary of the Queen's wedding-day she wrote to Baron Stockmar, "I wish I could think I had made one as happy as he has made me."
In April the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenberg, the Queen's brother-in- law, who was now an old man, died at Baden, after a long illness. He had been an upright, unlucky German prince, trusted by his contemporaries, a good husband and father—whose loss was severely felt by the widowed Princess. Her sorrow was reflected in the Queen's sympathy for her sister.
This year's Academy Exhibition contained Millais's "Black
Brunswicker," Landseer's "Flood in the Highlands," and Phillips's
"Marriage of the Princess Royal," now in the great corridor at Windsor
Castle. "The Idyls of the King," much admired by the Prince, were the
poems of the year.