great distance, and was of course a far
more terrible one. She had been ailing--so long indeed that I had
become habituated to it, and thought that she would continue to live
as she had been living. We had been travelling in Switzerland, in the
autumn of 1864; and I remember very vividly her saying on board the
steamer, by which we were leaving Colico at the head of the Lake of
Como, on our return to Italy, as she turned on the deck to take a last
look at the mountains, "Good-bye, you big beauties!" I little thought
it was her last adieu to them; but I thought afterwards that she
probably may have had some misgiving that it was so.

But it was not till the following spring that I began to realise that
I must lose her. She died on the 13th of April, 1865.

I have spoken of her as she was when she became my wife, but without
much hope of representing her to those who never had the happiness
of knowing her, as she really was, not only in person, which matters
little, but in mind and intellectual powers. And to tell what she was
in heart, in disposition--in a word, in soul--would be a far more
difficult task.

In her the aesthetic faculties were probably the most markedly
exceptional portion of her intellectual constitution. The often cited
dictum, _les races se feminisent_ was not exemplified in her case.
From her mother, an accomplished musician, she inherited her very
pronounced musical[1] faculty and tendencies, and, I think, little
else. From her father, a man of very varied capacities and culture,
she drew much more. How far, if in any degree, this fact may be
supposed to have been connected in the relation of cause and effect,
with the other fact that her mother was more than fifty years of age
at the time of her birth, I leave to the speculations of physiological
inquirers. In bodily constitution her inheritance from her father's
mother was most marked. To that source must be traced, I conceive, the
delicacy of constitution, speaking medically, which deprived me of
her at a comparatively early age; for both father and mother were
of thoroughly healthy and strong constitutions. But if it may be
suspected that the Brahmin Sultana, her grandmother, bequeathed her
her frail diathesis, there was no doubt or difficulty in tracing to
that source the exterior delicacy of formation which characterised
her. I remember her telling me that the last words a dying sister of
her mother's ever spoke, when Theodosia standing by t