DEATH AT ARSTA.

71

the Nightingale Sang to the Emperor. That night she dreamed of hearing the most glorious music. She caught cold from coming out of church on Christmas morning, but seemed to get better. Inflammation of the lungs, however, set in, and her sister and brother-in-law were sent for. She had a dream once that she would die at the age of sixty-six, and she said, smiling, to her sister, "You know it is not my death-year yet." But her illness increased. She went, leaning on the arm of her nurse, from window to window, as if she were taking leave of the country she loved so well, and often exclaimed, in broken sentences, "Light, eternal light!" She said she would have liked to remain a little longer to finish the work she had begun, but, later on, she whispered, "Now I am so tired that if God were to call me, I should be content." He did call her, at three o'clock in the morning of the 31st of December, 1865.

Innumerable wreaths of green leaves and white everlastings were put on her coffin, but the most beautiful of all, made of white camellias and long feathery grass, was from the children of the "Silent School." At the head of her grave, shaded by two lime-trees, stands a cross, with her name and the dates of her birth and death, and underneath, according to her own wish, are the words

"WHEN I CALLED UPON THE LORD, HE DELIVERED ME OUT OF ALL MY TROUBLE."

IV.

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

1802-1876.

Birth at Norwich-" Dull, unobservant, slow, and awkward "-At school in Bristol-Deafness begins-"V" of Norwich-Writes Penny Stories for Houlston-Three Prize Essays-A rift in the clouds-Success of Political Economy tales-Green glass bottles, soap and sweets !Deerbrook-The Hour and the Man-The Knoll-Writes leaders for the Daily News-Visits from George Eliot and James Payn-Death.

CA

ARLYLE once said to Harriet Martineau, "You are like a Lapland witch on her broomstick, going up and down as you will. Other people, without broomsticks, drop down and cannot come up when they would, and that is the difference between you and them." Nothing could have given a better idea of her inexhaustible activity. As Hartley Coleridge declared, "She was a monomaniac about everything." The practical side of life pressed closely upon her. Her question always was, "What use can I do here? What end can I serve?" She saw distinctly what she could do, and she did it thoroughly well. Life was to her a tremendous fact, or rather a series of facts. It was given to her to seize upon the popular needs of the day, and to supply them. Her father belonged to a French Huguenot family, who emigrated to Norwich in 1688. For some generations. the men of the Martineau family were surgeons; but Thomas Martineau set up as a bombazine and camlet manufacturer,

BORN JUNE 12TH, 1802; DIED JUNE 27TH, 1876.

(From a Painting by RICHMOND.)

NERVOUS TERRORS.

73

and married Elizabeth Rankin, eldest daughter of a Newcastle sugar-refiner. Harriet was the sixth of their eight children, and was born at Norwich on the 12th of June, 1802. Naturally a puny, delicate child, from bad nursing, and then from being fed on a milk diet, which always disagreed with her, she became more and more weakly. She had a horrid lump at her throat for hours every morning, and the most dreadful oppression at night. Nervous terrors haunted her. The dim light of the windows in the night seemed to advance till it pressed upon her eyeballs; the starlight seemed always coming down to crush and stifle her; and she could not even cross the yard to the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind, because she thought a wild beast was after her. One of the children's walks was up to the Castle Hill at Norwich. On a piece of waste ground at the side of the hill, feather beds were brought out and beaten with a stick, and the sound-a dull thud-made little Harriet's heart stand still. She hated that walk, but her parents knew nothing of all this. Her mother especially seemed in total ignorance of the nervous child's fears. Perhaps she could not understand them, or was too busy to attend to them.

"The child is father to the man," and so one of Harriet's early propensities was towards a sort of practical philosophy of her own. When she was two or three, she used to nod her head and say, "Never cry for trifles," "Dooty first and pleasure afterwards," and sometimes she got courage to edge up to strangers, and ask them to give her a maxim. She had a little book, made of folded paper, in which her beloved maxims were copied. She was soon anxious to teach others, and remembers taking her baby-brother, James, out of his crib, putting him in the open window, and talking religiously to him, as she looked out on a gorgeous sunset. Fretful, self-conscious, love-needy, with a keen sense of justice, disturbed by strange dreams, terrified at the prismatic colours of the lustre on the mantel