In the grief of the present the disagreements of the past were totally forgotten.  It was the horror and the mystery of Death—­Death, present and actual—­that seized upon the imagination of the Queen.  Her whole being, so instinct with vitality, recoiled in agony from the grim spectacle of the triumph of that awful power.  Her own mother, with whom she had lived so closely and so long that she had become a part almost of her existence, had fallen into nothingness before her very eyes!  She tried to forget, but she could not.  Her lamentations continued with a strange abundance, a strange persistency.  It was almost as if, by some mysterious and unconscious precognition, she realised that for her, in an especial manner, that grisly Majesty had a dreadful dart in store.

For indeed, before the year was out, a far more terrible blow was to fall upon her.  Albert, who had for long been suffering from sleeplessness, went, on a cold and drenching day towards the end of November, to inspect the buildings for the new Military Academy at Sandhurst.  On his return, it was clear that the fatigue and exposure to which he had been subjected had seriously affected his health.  He was attacked by rheumatism, his sleeplessness continued, and he complained that he felt thoroughly unwell.  Three days later a painful duty obliged him to visit Cambridge.  The Prince of Wales, who had been placed at that University in the previous year, was behaving in such a manner that a parental visit and a parental admonition had become necessary.  The disappointed father, suffering in mind and body, carried through his task; but, on his return journey to Windsor, he caught a fatal chill.  During the next week he gradually grew weaker and more miserable.  Yet, depressed and enfeebled as he was, he continued to work.  It so happened that at that very moment a grave diplomatic crisis had arisen.  Civil war had broken out in America, and it seemed as if England, owing to a violent quarrel with the Northern States, was upon the point of being drawn into the conflict.  A severe despatch by Lord John Russell was submitted to the Queen; and the Prince perceived that, if it was sent off unaltered, war would be the almost inevitable consequence.  At seven o’clock on the morning of December 1, he rose from his bed, and with a quavering hand wrote a series of suggestions for the alteration of the draft, by which its language might be softened, and a way left open for a peaceful solution of the question.  These changes were accepted by the Government, and war was averted.  It was the Prince’s last memorandum.

He had always declared that he viewed the prospect of death with equanimity.  “I do not cling to life,” he had once said to Victoria.  “You do; but I set no store by it.”  And then he had added:  “I am sure, if I had a severe illness, I should give up at once, I should not struggle for life.  I have no tenacity of life.”  He had judged correctly.  Before he had been ill many days, he told a friend that he