The autumn of 1854 saw the beginning of the enterprise for which all this time she had been unconsciously preparing herself. The country was being horrified by the tidings which continually came home of the appalling mismanagement of the military hospitals in the Crimea. Our gallant soldiers were dying by hundreds for lack of the simplest and most elementary nursing. It seemed, as religious people say, a clear “call” to this country squire’s daughter, and that very evening she wrote to Mr. Sidney Herbert (afterward Lord Herbert of Lea), the Secretary at War, and sketched her plan. At the very same time Mr. Herbert himself was writing to her to ask if she would organize and take out a company of nurses and the two letters crossed in the post. In October, 1854, Miss Nightingale started for the East with thirty-eight nurses in her command, some of whom were naturally nuns. The day after her arrival came the wounded from Balaklava, quickly followed by six hundred wounded from Inkerman and in a few months she had ten thousand poor fellows under her care. She did much more than organize; she would traverse at night, her little lamp in her hand, the four miles of crowded hospital wards and Longfellow’s famous lines are no poetic fiction, many a dying man turned to kiss her shadow as it fell.
Miss Florence Nightingale was the first woman to receive the Order of Merit, the coveted distinction formerly reserved exclusively for men. She received the freedom of the City of London in 1908 and was a Lady of Grace of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.—Belfast (Ireland) Telegram.
(1789)
LIFE, A NOBLE
I have seen at midnight the gleaming headlight of a giant locomotive, rushing onward through the darkness, heedless of danger and uncertainty, and I have thought the spectacle grand. I have seen the light come over the eastern hills in glory, driving the lazy darkness, like mist before a sea-born gale, till leaf and tree and blade of grass sparkled as myriad diamonds in the morning rays, and I have thought that it was grand. I have seen the lightning leap at midnight athwart the storm-swept sky, shivering over chaotic clouds, ’mid howling winds, till cloud and darkness and the shadow-haunted earth flashed into midday splendor, and I have known that it was grand. But the grandest thing, next to the radiance that flows from the Almighty’s throne, is the light of a noble and beautiful life, shining in benediction upon the destines of men, and finding its home in the bosom of the everlasting God.—John Temple Graves.
(1790)
LIFE A TREE
A Scandinavian allegory represents human life as a tree, the “Igdrasil,” or the tree of existence, whose roots grow deep down in the soil of mystery; the trunk reaches above the clouds; its branches spread out over the globe. At the foot of it sit the Past, the Present and the Future, watering the roots. Its boughs spread out through all lands and all time; every leaf of the tree is a biography, every fiber a word, a thought or a deed; its boughs are the histories of nations; the rustle of it is the noise of human existence onward from of old; it grows amid the howling of the hurricane; it is the great tree of humanity.
(1791)
LIFE A VOYAGE