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It was hard for them to hear of their comrades going home proud and happy in the honours they had won, while they were left behind in pain and weariness, but it would have been infinitely harder without the knowledge that Miss Nightingale would bear them company to the end.
Phoebus, Diana, and Philomel are, with the thoughts they convey, beautiful in their right places, but so are the sun, moon, and nightingale. Wordsworth tried to make men see with new eyes the little everyday things that they had looked upon week by week and year by year until they had grown common. He tried to make them see these things again with "the glory and the freshness of a dream."*
Crossing this brook and following the path round the hillside, where so often the nightingale sings, you pass under a little villa by a stony way to Corbignano, and there, in what may well be the oldest house in the place, at the end of the street, past the miraculous orange tree, just where the hill turns out of sight, you see Boccaccio's house, Casa di Boccaccio, as it is written; and though the old tower has become a loggia, and much has been rebuilt, you may still see the very ancient stones of the place jutting into the lane, where the water sings so after the rain, and the olives whisper softly all night long, and God walks always among the vines.
Why, even the nightingale herself, who sang so sweetly in the orange groves at night that sometimes the Moon leaned down to listen, was not much to look at after all; and, besides, he had been kind to them, and during that terribly bitter winter, when there were no berries on the trees, and the ground was as hard as iron, and the wolves had come down to the very gates of the city to look for food, he had never once forgotten them, but had always given them crumbs out of his little hunch of black bread, and divided with them whatever poor breakfast he had.
The horses and mules, protected by the pines, had not suffered much, and, in order that their trail might be hidden by the melting sleet, they packed and departed before breakfast, choosing a northwesterly direction. They picked the best ground, but it was all rough. Nevertheless the three were cheerful, and the Little Giant whistled like a nightingale.
The whole caravan thought of the same thing; therefore, the rising dawn seemed to them a message from the sun, of fortune that was to gleam brightly upon them. They heard the dying nightingale sing: it was no false prophet, but a harbinger of fortune. The wind whistled, therefore they did not understand that the nightingale sung, 'Fare away over the sea!
These two Florence Nightingale and Sydney Herbert the one in guiding the Administration, the other inspiring the nation, did imperishable good.
To all of whom Master Pembury gave a piece of his mind. "Wray, old man," said he, that evening, "you and Noll and I shall have to do the whole thing between us, that's all about it." "Awfully sorry!" said Wraysford; "you'll have to let me off this time. I'm working like nails for the Nightingale." "Bother the Nightingale, I say! What is it to the Dominican?
And who is this woman to whom the government of Great Britain felt that it owed so much, and whom the whole world delights to honor? Florence Nightingale, born in 1820, in the beautiful Italian city of that name, is the younger of two daughters of William Shore Nightingale, a wealthy land-owner, who inherited both the name and fortune of his granduncle, Peter Nightingale.
And Gorgias the sophister, when a swallow muted upon him, looked upon her and said, Philomel, this was not well done. Or perhaps this is all without foundation; for the nightingale, though concerned in the same tragedy, we willingly receive.
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