Page:Portraits of celebrated women Florence Nightingale.djvu/20

120 can conceive her to be a strict disciplinarian; she throws herself into a work, as its head—as such she knows well how much success must depend upon the literal obedience to her every order. She seems to understand business thoroughly. Her nerve is wonderful; I have been with her at very severe operations; she was more than equal to the trial. She has an utter disregard of contagion. I have known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The more awful to every sense every particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, her slight form would be seen bending over him, administering to his ease in every way in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him."

Delightful is that intimation that Miss Nightingale gives token of being "gifted with a lively sense of the ridiculous." Possessing the exquisite perception of the pathetic in existence which her whole career proclaims her to have, it would have been a defect in her nature, nay, a lack of the complete feeling for pathos itself, had she not betrayed a capacity for receiving humorous impressions. Humor and pathos are so nearly allied, in their source within the human heart, so mingled in those recesses whence spring human tears at the touch of sympathy, that scarcely any being deeply affected by mournful emotion, can remain insensible to the keen appeal that resides in a ludicrous idea. Shakspeare, who comprehended to perfection every impulse of humanity, affords multitudinous illustrations of this close consociation of a sense of pathos and a sense of humor in the finest natures. That particular feature chronicled by Mr. Osborne in his personal description of Miss Nightingale, is just the exquisite point, to our imagination, that crowns her admirable qualities. It accords with an intensely-beautiful account of her that was related by Mr. Sydney Herbert at a public meeting convened in Miss Nightingale's honor. He said an anecdote had been sent to him by a correspondent showing her great power over all with whom she came in contact. He read the passage from the letter, which was this: "I have just heard such a