The sound of the Derwent was often in Florence's ears. When she was in the Hospital at Scutari any fretting in the Straits recalled it to her. “How I like,” she said on a stormy night, “to hear that ceaseless roar; it puts me in mind of the dear Derwent; how often I have listened to it from the nursery window.”

Lea Hurst became one of Florence Nightingale's earliest homes in England, but it was not the earliest of all. The house was not built when the family returned from the Continent, and Mr. Nightingale took Kynsham Court, Presteigne, in Herefordshire. The place, it seems, was “more picturesque than habitable,” and negotiations for the purchase of it, with a view to improvements, fell through. Mr. Nightingale liked Derbyshire, and was fond of his new house; but the rich, as well as the poor, have their perplexities. “The difficulty is,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife, “where is the county that is habitable for twelve successive months?” And, again, “How would you like Leicestershire? For my part, I think that, provided I could get about 2000 acres and a house in some neighbouring county where sporting and scenery were in tolerable abundance, and the visit to Lea Hurst were annually confined to July, August, September, and October, then all would be well.” While Mrs. Nightingale stayed at Kynsham, or took the children for change of air to the seaside or Tunbridge Wells, Mr. Nightingale divided his time between the management of his property in Derbyshire and the search for a second home elsewhere. Ultimately he found what he wanted at Embley Park in the parish of Wellow, near Romsey. This estate was bought in 1825, and Kynsham was given up. Embley is on the edge of the New Forest, and the rich growth of its woods and gardens is much favoured by sun and moisture. Old oaks and beeches, thickets of flowering laurel and rhododendron, and a profusion of flowers and scents, contrast with the bare breezy hills of Derbyshire. Its new owners had here the variety they wished for, and a full scope for their taste. The most praised of its beauties is a long road almost shut in by masses of rhododendron. One of the occasional pleasures of Miss Nightingale's later life in London was a drive in the Park, in rhododendron-time, “to remind her of Embley.”

III

From her fifth year onwards Florence Nightingale had, then, for her homes Lea Hurst in the summer months and Embley during the rest of the year. The family usually spent a portion of the season in London. The sisters led, it will thus be seen, a life mainly in the country, and Florence as a child became fond of flowers, birds, and beasts. A neatly printed manuscript-book is preserved, in which she made a catalogue of her collection of flowers, describing each with analytical accuracy, and noting the particular spot at which it was picked. Her childish letters contain many references to animal companions. She made particular friends with the nuthatch. She had a pet pig, a pet donkey, a pet pony. She was fond of riding, and fond of dogs. “A small pet animal,” she said many years afterwards, “is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.” “The more I see of men,” wrote a cynic, “the more I love dogs.” Florence Nightingale, in the same piece from which I have just quoted, drew a like moral from her experience of some nurses. “An invalid,” she said, “in giving an account of his nursing by a nurse and a dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘it did not talk.’”[7] There were no babies in the Nightingale family after the arrival of Florence herself, but most of her mother's many brothers and sisters married and had families; and as Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale's houses were often visited by these relations, there was seldom wanting a succession of babies, and in them and their christenings, and teethings, and illnesses, and lessons, Florence took that interest which is often strong in little girls.

Sometimes a baby died, and her letters show that Florence was as much interested in a death as in a birth. She rejoiced in “the little angels in heaven.” One of her favourite poems at this period was The Better Land of Mrs. Hemans, which she copied out for a cousin as “so very beautiful.” The earliest letter which I have seen, written when she was ten, strikes mingled notes. She is staying with Uncle Octavius Smith at “Thames Bank” (a house which then adjoined his distillery at Millbank), and writes to her sister, who is on a visit with the maid to another set of cousins:—

Give my love to Clémence, and tell her, if you please, that I am not in the room where she established me, but in a very small one; instead of the beautiful view of the Thames, a most dismal one of the black distillery, and, whenever I open my window, the nasty smell rushes in like a torrent. But I like it pretty well notwithstanding. There is a hole through the wall[11] close to my door, which communicates with the bath-room, which is next the room where Freddy[8] sleeps, and he talks to me by there. Tell her also, if you please, that I have washed myself all over and feet in warm water since I came every night. I went up into the distillery to the very tip-top by ladders with Uncle Oc and Fred Saturday night. We walked along a great pipe. We have had a good deal of boating which I like very much. We see three steam-boats pass every day, the Diana, the Fly, and the Endeavour. My love to all of them except Miss W——. Give my love particularly to Hilary. Your affect and only sister. Dear Pop, I think of you, pray let us love one another more than we have done. Mama wishes it particularly, it is the will of God, and it will comfort us in our trials through life. Good-bye.

Was Miss W—— an unsympathetic governess? Whoever she was, the exception in her disfavour shows an unregenerate impulse which contrasts naïvely with the following good resolve towards her sister. To a year earlier belongs a little note-book, entitled “Journal of Flo, Embley.” It begins with the reminder, “The Lord is with thee wherever thou art.” And then an entry records, “Sunday, I obliged to sit still by Miss Christie till I had the spirit of obedience.” As a child, and throughout all the earlier part of her life, Florence was much given to dreaming, and in some introspective speculations written in 1851 she recalled the pleasures of naughtiness. “When I was a child and was naughty, it always put an end to my dreaming for the time. I never could tell why. Was it because naughtiness was a more interesting state than the little motives which make man's peaceful civilized state, and occupied imagination for the time?” To Miss Christie, her first governess, Florence became greatly attached, and the death of the lady a few years later threw her into deep grief. She was a sensitive, and a somewhat morbid child; and though she presently developed a lively sense of humour, to which she had the capacity of giving trenchant expression, it was the humour of intellect rather than the outcome of a joyous disposition. Her early letters contain little note of childish fun. They are for the most part grave and introspective. She was self-absorbed, and had the shyness which attends upon that habit. “My greatest ambition,” she wrote in some private reminiscences of her early life, “was not to be remarked. I was always in mortal fear of doing something unlike other people, and I said, ‘If I were sure that nobody would remark me I should be quite happy.’ I had a morbid terror of not using my knives and forks like other people when I should come out. I was afraid of speaking to children because I was sure I should not please them.” Meanwhile, she was perhaps at times, even as a child, a little “difficult” at home. “Ask Flo,” wrote her father to his wife in 1832, “if she has lost her intellect. If not, why does she grumble at troubles which she cannot remedy by grumbling?”

IV

The appeal to his daughter's intellect was characteristic of Mr. Nightingale. He was himself a well-informed man, educated at Edinburgh, and Trinity, Cambridge; and, like some others of the Unitarian circle, he held views much in advance of the average opinion of his time about the intellectual education of women. The home education of his daughters was largely supervised by himself; it included a range of subjects far outside the curriculum current in “young ladies' seminaries”; and perhaps, like Hannah More's father, he was sometimes “frightened at his own success.” Letters and note-books show, it is true, that his daughters were duly instructed in the accomplishments deemed appropriate to young ladies. We hear of them learning the use of the globes, writing books of elegant extracts, working footstools, and doing fancy work. They studied music, grammar, composition, modern languages. “We used to read Tasso and Ariosto and Alfieri with my father,” Florence said; “he was a good and always interested Italian scholar, never pedantic, never a tiresome grammarian, but he spoke Italian like an Italian and I took care of the verbs.” Mr. Nightingale added constitutional history, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. By the time Florence was sixteen, he was reading Homer with his daughters. Miss Nightingale used to say that at Greek her sister was the quicker scholar. Their father set them appointed tasks to prepare. Parthenope would trust largely to improvisation or lucky shots. Florence was more laborious; and sometimes would get up at four in the morning to prepare the lesson. Her knowledge of Latin was of some practical use in later years. In conversations with abbots and monks whom she met during her travels she sometimes found in Latin their only common tongue. Among Florence's papers were preserved many sheets in her father's handwriting, containing the heads of admirable outlines of the political history of England and of some foreign states. Her own note-books show that in her teens she had mastered the elements of Latin and Greek. She analysed the Tusculan Disputations. She translated portions of the Phaedo, the Crito and the Apology. She had studied Roman, German, Italian, and Turkish history. She had analysed Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Human Mind. Her father was in the habit, too, of suggesting themes on which his daughters were to write compositions. It was the system of the College Essay. “Florence has now taken to mathematics,” wrote her sister in 1840, “and, like everything she undertakes, she is deep in them and working very hard.” The direction in which Florence Nightingale was to exercise the faculties thus trained was as yet hidden in the future; but to her father's guidance she was indebted for the mental grasp and power of intellectual concentration which were to distinguish her work in life.

It is a natural temptation of biographers to give a formal unity to their subject by representing the child as in all things the father of the man; to date the vocation of their hero or heroine very early in life; to magnify some childish incident as prophetic of what is to come thereafter. Material is available for such treatment in the case of Florence Nightingale. It has been recorded that she used to nurse and bandage the dolls which her elder sister damaged. Every book about the heroine of the Crimea contains, too, a tale of “first aid to the wounded” which Florence administered to Cap, the shepherd's collie, whom she found with a broken leg on the downs near Embley. “I wonder,” wrote her “old Pastor”[9] to her in 1858, “whether you remember how, twenty-two years ago, you and I together averted the intended hanging of poor old Shepherd Smithers's dog, Cap. How many times I have told the story since! I well recollect the pleasure which the saving of the life of a poor dog then gave to your young mind. I was delighted to witness it; it was to me not indeed an omen of what you were about to do and be (for of that I never dreamed), but it was an index of that kind and benevolent disposition, of that I Cor. xiii. Charity, which has been at the root of it.” And it is certainly interesting and curious, if nothing more, that the very earliest piece in the handwriting of Florence Nightingale which has been preserved should be a medical prescription. It is contained in a tiny book, about the size of a postage-stamp, which the little girl stitched together and in which the instruction is written, in very childish letters, “16 grains for an old woman, 11 for a young woman, and 7 for a child.” But these things are after all but trifles. Florence Nightingale is not the only little girl who has been fond of nursing sick dolls or mending them when broken. Other children have tended wounded animals and had their pill-boxes and simples. Much, too, has been written about Florence's kindness as a child to her poorer neighbours. Her mother, both at Lea Hurst and at Embley, sometimes occupied herself in good works. She and her husband were particularly interested in a “cheap school” which they supported at their Derbyshire home. “Large sums of money have been paid,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife in 1832, “to your schoolmistress for many praiseworthy purposes, who works con amore in looking after the whole population, young and old.” Florence took her place, beside her mother, in visiting poor neighbours, in arranging school-treats, in giving village entertainments. But thousands of other squires' daughters, before and after her, have done the like. And Florence herself, as many entries in her diaries show, was not conscious of doing much, but reproachful of herself for doing little. The constant burden of her self-examination, both at this time and for many years to come, was that she was for ever “dreaming” and never “doing.” She was dreaming because for a long time she did not clearly feel or see what her work in life was to be; and then for yet another period of time because, when she knew what she was called to do, she could not compass the means to do it. Her faculties were not brought outwards, but were left, by the conditions of her life, to devour themselves inwardly.