then absorbed
Mrs. Jameson's attention and occupied her pen, gave place to others of a
very different kind--those which engrossed for a time, to the exclusion
of almost all others, the minds of men and women in England at the
beginning of the Crimean War; when the fashion of certain forms of
philanthropy set by that wonderful woman, Florence Nightingale, was
making hospital nurses of idle, frivolous fine ladies, and turning into
innumerable channels of newly awakened benevolence and activity--far
more zealous than discreet--the love of adventure, the desire for
excitement, and the desperate need of occupation, of many women who had
no other qualifications for the hard and holy labors into which they
flung themselves.

Mrs. Jameson felt the impulse of the time, as it reached her through
Lady Byron and Miss Nightingale, and warmly embraced the wider and more
enlightened aspect of women's duties beginning to be advocated with
extreme enthusiasm in English society. One of the last books she
published was a popular account of foreign Sisters of Mercy, their
special duties, the organization of their societies, and the sphere of
their operations; suggesting the formation of similar bodies of
religiously charitable sisterhoods in England. She had this subject so
much at heart, she told me, that she had determined to give a series of
public lectures upon it, provided she found her physical power equal to
the effort of making herself heard by an audience in any public room of
moderate size. She tested the strength of her chest and voice by
delivering one lecture to an audience assembled in the drawing-rooms of
a friend; but, as she never repeated the experiment, I suppose she found
the exertion too great for her.

When first I met Mrs. Jameson she was an attractive-looking young woman,
with a skin of that dazzling whiteness which generally accompanies
reddish hair, such as hers was; her face, which was habitually refined
and _spirituelle_ in its expression, was capable of a marvelous power of
concentrated feeling, such as is seldom seen on any woman's face, and is
peculiarly rare on the countenance of a fair, small, delicately featured
woman, all whose personal characteristics were essentially feminine. Her
figure was extremely pretty; her hands and arms might have been those of
Madame de Warens.

Mrs. Jameson told me that the idea of giving public lectures had
suggested itself to her in the course of her conversations with L