f
being the daughter of a soldier, she loved her own soldiers and
sailors, and marked to the very last day of her life their gallant
deeds with delight. But there was throughout her life something more
than physical courage, and that was her moral courage.

Take, first of all, the way in which she bore her own personal
troubles. If there was anyone who could say with the Psalmist, "All
Thy waves and storms have gone over me," it was our late Queen. What
the loss of her husband was to her, you may gather from this beautiful
letter published in Lord Selborne's Life, which she addressed to him
years afterwards on the loss of his own wife: "To lose the loved
companion of one's life is losing half one's own existence. From that
time everything is different, every event seems to lose its effect; for
joy, which cannot be shared by those who feel everything with you, is
no joy, and sorrow is redoubled when it cannot be shared and soothed by
the one who alone could do so. No children can replace a wife or a
husband, may they be ever so good and devoted. One must bear one's
burden alone. That our Heavenly Father may give you strength in this
heavy affliction, and that your health may not suffer, is the sincere
prayer of yours most truly, Victoria, R.I." [1] There could hardly
have been penned, one would have thought, a more touching or more
beautiful letter, and penned years after the loss of her husband. It
revealed to the heart of the nation what that loss was to her. It was
followed in the years afterwards by the loss of children and
grandchildren. And the first thing, therefore, that strikes us is
that, in the midst of this personal sorrow, one stroke following after
another, with a moral courage which is an example to us all, she never
gave up her work; without fainting or failing, that huge pile of
documents, which, in a few days of cessation from her work, mounted
up--a great statesman tells us--so high, was dealt with, those
ceaseless interviews, that constant correspondence--were carried
through up to the last by one who proved herself faithful unto death.

And, as with personal sorrow, so with public anxiety. It has become
now common property that, in the dark days of December, 1899, the Queen
was the one who refused to be depressed in her court; when disaster
followed disaster it was the Queen who, by her moral courage, kept up
the spirits of those around her, and who, with a perfect trust in her
soldiers