for whom her compassion was so quick and so sharply sympathetic.  Something remorseful mingled then, and may mingle now, with the affection felt for this lost benefactor, who had not only been somewhat jealously eyed by certain classes on his first coming, but who had suffered much silently from misunderstanding and also from deliberate misrepresentation, and only by patient continuance in well-doing had at last won the favour which was his rightful due.

    “That which we have we prize not to the worth
    While we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost,
    Why, then we rack the value, then we find
    The virtue that possession would not show us
    While it was ours.”

A peculiar tenderness was ever after cherished for Princess Alice, who in this dark hour rose up to be her mother’s comforter, endeavouring in every way possible to save her all trouble—­“all communications from the Ministers and household passed through the Princess’s hands to the Queen, then bowed down with grief....  It was the very intimate intercourse with the sorrowing Queen at that time which called forth in Princess Alice that keen interest and understanding in politics for which she was afterwards so distinguished.  The gay, bright girl suddenly developed into a wise, far-seeing woman, living only for others.”

[Illustration:  Princess Alice.]

This ministering angel in the house of mourning had been already betrothed, with her parents’ full approval, to Prince Louis of Hesse; and to him she was married on July 1st, 1862, at Osborne, very quietly, as befitted the mournful circumstance of the royal family.  Many a heartfelt wish for her happiness followed “England’s England-loving daughter” to her foreign home, where she led a beautiful, useful life, treading in her father’s footsteps, and continually cherished by the love of her mother; and the peculiarly touching manner of her death, a sort of martyrdom to sweet domestic affections, again stirred the heart of her own people to mournful admiration.  A cottager’s wife might have died as Princess Alice died, through breathing in the poison of diphtheria as she hung, a constant, loving nurse, over the pillows of her suffering husband and children.  This beautiful homeliness that has marked the lives of our Sovereign and her children has been of inestimable value, raising simple human virtues to their proper pre-eminence before the eyes of the English people of to-day, who are very materially, if often unconsciously, swayed by the example set them in high places.

In the May after Prince Consort’s death the second International Exhibition was opened, amid sad memories of the first, so joyful in every way, and a certain sense of discouragement because the golden days of universal peace seemed farther off than ten years before.

        “Is the goal so far away? 
        Far, how far no tongue can say;
        Let us dream our dream to-day.”