Queen Victoria

THE whole fabric of the Queen's domestic happiness was shattered. Albert had often spoken to her of the shortness of life, but she had felt "with instinctive certainty" that it would be granted to them to grow old together. In the darkness she clung, curiously unreticent, to the simple faith from which she never wavered. To one Minister she wrote: "The things of this world are of no interest to the Queen . . . for her thoughts are fixed above." To another that she had only "one consolation -- to rejoin him again, never to part," and to Uncle Leopold that this parting "must be for his good, his happiness . . . His great soul is now only enjoying that for which it was worthy. And I will not envy him -- only pray that mine may be perfected by it, and fit to be with him eternally for which blessed moment I earnestly long. He seems so near to me, so quite my own now. . ."^*

From that conviction -- the sense of his living presence, and of the sure reunion -- sprang an inevitable resolution. In life he had been "her Angel and Master," his mind, known to her and her alone, had been the incarnation of a wisdom almost divine and by that and that alone she would shape her days. "I am also anxious," she wrote again to her Uncle, "to repeat one thing, and that one is my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision, viz. that his wishes -- his plans -- about everything, his views about every thing are to be my law! And no human power will make me swerve from

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