CHAPTER II

THE MYSTICAL WAY Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God--to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only what is right, or what is the will of God (the same question), then we may truly be said to live in His light.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. It has been mentioned incidentally in an earlier chapter that Miss Nightingale was fond of reading the books of Catholic devotion which the Reverend Mother of the Bermondsey Convent used to send her. Long before, she had studied carefully the writings of the Port Royalists; and at the Trinità de' Monti she had seen the ideal of Catholic devotion in real life. She used to pass on some of her devotional works to Mr. Jowett. He began with St. Teresa, and, at first repelled, he gradually became interested. Miss Nightingale was in the habit of copying out passages for her own edification, sometimes in the original, sometimes translating them. The idea of making a selection for publication occurred to her, and Mr. Jowett encouraged it. "Do not give up your idea," he said, "of making a selection of the better mind of the Middle Ages and the Mystics." "You will do a good work," he wrote again (Oct. 3, 1872), "if you point out the kind of mysticism which is needed in the present day--not mysticism at all, but as intense a feeling, as the mystics had, of the power of truth and reason and of the will of God that they should take effect in the world. The passion of the reason, the fusion of faith and reason, the reason in religion and the religion in reason--if you can only describe these, you will teach people a new lesson. The new has something still to learn from the old; and I am not certain whether we ought not to retire into mysticism (I thought I should not use the word) when the antagonism with existing opinions becomes too great." Miss Nightingale's close study of Plato and of the Bible, described in the last chapter, increased her interest in Christian mysticism. The Fourth Gospel was the work of a mystic. And there were curious analogies, which she pointed out to Mr. Jowett,[145] between Plato and the mediæval mystics. The famous myth of the purified soul, for instance, recalled a passage in the _Fioretti_ of St. Francis, except that there the purgatorial stage, before the "wings grow," lasts 150 years, instead of 10,000. Miss Nightingale said of the closing prayer in the _Phaedrus_--"Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and inward man be at one"--a prayer unequalled, she thought, by any Collect in the service-book--that it "put in seventeen words the whole, or at least half, of the doctrine of St. John of the Cross." Plato made her the more interested in the Christian Mystics; the Christian Mystics, the more interested in Plato. Concurrently with her work for Mr. Jowett's revised _Plato_ she gave much time during 1873 and 1874 (with additions in later years) to transcribing or translating and arranging passages from devotional writers of the Middle Ages. She had sent some of her book in various stages to Mr. Jowett, who, with other suggestions, said (April 18, 1873) that she ought to add "a Preface showing the use of such books. They are apt to appear unreal, and yet Thomas à Kempis has been one of the most influential books in the world. The subject of the Preface should be the use of the ideal and especially the spiritual ideal. I do not say what may be the case with great Saints themselves, but for us I think it is clear that this mystic state ought to be an occasional and not a permanent feeling--a taste of heaven in daily life. Do you think it would be possible to write a mystical book which would also be the essence of Common Sense?" [145] He made use of her suggestion in a postscript (in the _second_ edition) to his Introduction to the _Phaedrus_. II I construct the Preface from various notes and rough drafts in Miss Nightingale's hand:-- It may seem a strange thing to begin a book with:--this Book is not for any one who has time to read it--but the meaning of it is: this reading is good only as a preparation for work. If it is not to inspire life and work, it is bad. Just as the end of food is to enable us to live and work, and not to live and eat, so the end of--most reading perhaps, but certainly of--mystical reading is not to read but to work. For what is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for "The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only _here_ but _now_. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like God for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be _here_ and _now_, as well as _there_ and _then_. And it may be for a time--then lost--then recovered--both _here_ and _there_, both _now_ and _then_. That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics--as is more particularly set forth in a definition of the 16th century: "True religion is to have no other will but God's." Compare this with the definition of Religion in Johnson's _Dictionary_: "Virtue founded upon reverence of God and expectation of future rewards and punishments"; in other words on respect and self-interest, not love. Imagine the religion which inspired the life of Christ "founded" on the motives given by Dr. Johnson! Christ Himself was the first true Mystic. "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work." What is this but putting in fervent and the most striking words the foundation of all real Mystical Religion?--which is that for all our actions, all our words, all our thoughts, the food upon which they are to live and have their being is to be the indwelling Presence of God, the union with God; that is, with the Spirit of Goodness and Wisdom. Where shall I find God? In myself. That is the true Mystical Doctrine. But then I myself must be in a state for Him to come and dwell in me. This is the whole aim of the Mystical Life; and all Mystical Rules in all times and countries have been laid down for putting the soul into such a state. That the soul herself should be heaven, that our Father which is in heaven should dwell in her, that there is something within us infinitely more estimable than often comes out, that God enlarges this "palace of our soul" by degrees so as to enable her to receive Himself, that thus he gives her liberty but that the soul must give herself up absolutely to Him for Him to do this, the incalculable benefit of this occasional but frequent intercourse with the Perfect: this is the conclusion and sum of the whole matter, put into beautiful language by the Mystics. And of this process they describe the steps, and assign periods of months and years during which the steps, they say, are commonly made by those who make them at all. These old Mystics whom we call superstitious were far before us in their ideas of God and of prayer (that is of our communion with God). "Prayer," says a mystic of the 16th century, "is to ask not what we wish of God, but what God wishes of us." "Master who hast made and formed the vessel of the body of Thy creature, and hast put within so great a treasure, the Soul, which bears the image of Thee": so begins a dying prayer of the 14th century. In it and in the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a petition. There is never a word of the theory that God's dealings with us are to show His "power"; still less of the theory that "of His own good pleasure" He has "predestined" any souls to eternal damnation. There is little mention of heaven for self; of desire of happiness for self, none. It is singular how little mention there is either of "intercession" or of "Atonement by Another's merits." True it is that we can only _create_ a heaven for _ourselves and others_ "by the merits of Another," since it is only by working in accordance with God's Laws that we can do anything. But there is nothing at all in these prayers as if God's anger had to be bought off, as if He had to be bribed into giving us heaven by sufferings merely "to satisfy God's justice." In the dying prayers, there is nothing of the "egotism of death." It is the reformation of God's church--that is, God's children, for whom the self would give itself, that occupies the dying thoughts. There is not often a desire to be released from trouble and suffering. On the contrary, there is often a desire to suffer the greatest suffering, and to offer the greatest offering, with even greater pain, if so any work can be done. And still, this, and all, is ascribed to God's _goodness_. The offering is not to buy anything by suffering, but--If only the suppliant can do anything for God's children! These suppliants did not live to see the "reformation" of God's children. No more will any who now offer these prayers. But at least we can all work towards such practical "reformation." The way to live with God is to live with Ideas--not merely to think about ideals, but to do and suffer for them. Those who have to work on men and women must above all things have their Spiritual Ideal, their purpose, ever present. The "mystical" state is the essence of common sense. The authors whom Miss Nightingale read for the purpose of her selection included St. Angela of Foligno, Madame de Chatel, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Francis Xavier, St. John of the Cross, Peter of Alcantara, Father Rigoleuc, St. Teresa, and Father Surin. She arranged her extracts from these and other writers under headings, and supplied marginal summaries. She prepared also a title-page:--_Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen, and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale_. III This and all other literary work was interrupted, however, at the beginning of 1874 by the death of her father. She was in London; her sister and Sir Harry Verney were with him and Mrs. Nightingale at Embley. He was 80; but, though his strength of body and mind had failed a little, he had been out for his usual ride a few days before. Lady Verney had wished him good-night. "Say not good-night," he said in reply, quoting Mrs. Barbauld, "but in some brighter clime Bid me good-morning." A day or two later, he came down to breakfast as usual, but found that he had forgotten his watch. He went to fetch it, slipped upon the stairs, and died on the spot. Miss Nightingale felt the loss of her father deeply. "His reverent love for you," wrote Lord Houghton in a letter of condolence (Jan. 13, 1874), "was inexpressibly touching," and her love for him, though of a different kind, was very tender. Unlike in many respects, father and daughter were yet kindred spirits in intellectual curiosity, in a taste for speculative inquiry. M. Mohl noted among Mr. Nightingale's engaging characteristics "a modest curiosity about everything, a surprised, innocent, incredulous smile as he listened intently." Miss Irby spoke of his "exceeding sweetness and childlikeness of wisdom." These qualities were conspicuous in much of his intercourse with his daughter Florence, and she was now deprived of the father who had, in things of the mind, sat at her feet and sympathized in her searches after truth. The death of her father was quickly followed, on January 31, 1874, by that of her dearly loved friend, Mrs. Bracebridge. "She was more than mother to me," wrote Florence to M. and Madame Mohl (Feb. 3); "and oh that I could not be a daughter to her in her last sad days! What should I have been without her? and what would many have been without her? To one living with her as I did once, she was unlike any other human being: as unlike as a picture of a sunny scene is to the real light and warmth of sunshine: or as this February lamp we call our sun is to her own Sun of living light in Greece.... Other people live together to make each other worse: she lived with all to make them better. And she was not like a chastened Christian saint: no more like that than Apollo; but she had qualities which no Greek God ever had--real humility (excepting my dear Father, I never knew any one so really humble), and with it the most active heart and mind and buoyant soul that could well be conceived." Mr. Bracebridge had died eighteen months before (July 18, 1872), and Miss Nightingale had said: "He and she have been the creators of my life. And when I think of him at Scutari, the only man in all England who would have lived with willingness such a pigging life, without the interest and responsibility which it had to me, I think that we shall never look upon his like again. And when I think of Atherstone, of Athens, of all the places I have been in with them, of the immense influence they had in shaping my own life--more than earthly father and mother to me--I cannot doubt that they leave behind them, having shaped many lives as they did mine, their mark on the century--this century which has so little ideal at least in England. They were so immeasurably above any English 'country gentry' I have ever known." Miss Nightingale's estimate of her friends was shared by others who had enjoyed their hospitality. "The death of Mrs. Bracebridge," wrote M. Mohl (Feb. 14), "is a sad blow for you. The breaking of these old associations which nothing new can replace impoverishes one's life, and a part of ourselves dies out with old friends even if they have not been to us what Mrs. Bracebridge was to you. _Und immer stiller wird's und stiller auf unserm Pfad_ until the great problem of life opens for ourselves. Two better people than the Bracebridges, different as they were, I have never seen. Madame d'Abbadie has a queer expression for a woman she approves of; she says _elle est honnête homme_, and nothing is more appropriate to Mrs. Bracebridge. I can never think of Atherstone without emotion; it is people like these in whom lies the glory of England and the strength of the country. They were so genuine, so ready to help and to impoverish themselves for public purposes, and to do it unostentatiously and without fishing for popularity." To the end of her life Miss Nightingale cherished the memory of these faithful and helpful friends. "To my beloved and revered friends," she said in her Will, "Mr. Charles Bracebridge and his wife, my more than mother, without whom Scutari and my life could not have been, and to whom nothing that I could ever say or do would in the least express my thankfulness, I should have left some token of my remembrance had they, as I expected, survived me." The death of her companion at Scutari removed one of the few links with Miss Nightingale's happier past. The death of her father was not only a bereavement which she felt deeply; it also involved her in much distracting business. Her father's landed properties, at Embley and Lea Hurst, now passed, under the entail, to his sister, "Aunt Mai," and her husband. Florence did not attend her father's funeral, but soon she went down to Embley to look after her mother. There, and afterwards in London, she was immersed in worrying affairs. Her only comfort, she wrote repeatedly in private notes, was the "goodness" of Mr. Shore Smith--"her boy" of old days. The letters of Mr. Coltman, one of her father's executors, were full of humour, but Florence was never able to take things lightly. There were questions of property and residence to be discussed; servants to be dismissed and engaged; her mother's immediate movements and future mode of life to be settled. Everybody had a different plan, and Florence complained that nobody but she had the same plan for two days running. Her letters and notes at this period are of a quite tragic intensity. Something may be ascribed to a characteristic over-emphasis. "We Smiths," she said once of herself, "all exaggerate"; and Mr. Jowett said of some remarks made by her about him: "You are as nearly right as an habitual spirit of exaggeration will ever allow you to be." "We are a great many too many strong characters," she wrote of herself and her family, "and very different: all pulling different ways. And we are so dreadfully _au sérieux_. Oh, how much good it does us to have some one to laugh at us!" But there was no exaggeration in one of her woes. A third of her time was taken up with the Nightingale Nurses; another third with Indian affairs (for in relation to India, as we shall hear, she never quite "went out of office"); the remaining third, which might have been devoted to working out a scheme of social and moral science on the statistical methods of M. Quetelet, or on preparing for the press her selections from the Mystics, was being wasted in family worries. M. Quetelet, with whom she had been corresponding, had recently died. "I cannot say," she wrote to Dr. Farr (Feb. 23, 1874), "how the death of our old friend touches me: he was the founder of the most important science in the whole world. Some months ago I prepared the first sketch of an Essay I meant to publish and dedicate to him on the application of his discoveries to explain the Plan of God in teaching us by these results the laws by which our Moral Progress is to be attained. I had pleased myself with thinking that this would please him. But painful and indispensable business prevented the finishing of my paper." "O God," she exclaimed in the bitterness of her heart, "let me not sink in these perplexities: but give me a great cause to do and die for." And again: "What makes the difference between man and woman? Quetelet did his work, and I am so disturbed by my family that I can't do mine." IV So, then, Miss Nightingale never finished her book on the Mystics; but she did something which, if we take her view of literary work, we may account far better; she lived it. No words of Florence Nightingale's that have been quoted in the course of this Memoir are more intensely autobiographical, none express more truly the spirit in which she lived and moved and had her being, than those which I have put together on a preceding page from her Notes on the Mystics. Her creed may seem cold to some minds, but she invested it with a spiritual fervour which none of the Mystics has surpassed. This woman, so practical, so business-like, and in her outward dealings with men and affairs so worldly-wise, was a dreamer, a devotee, a religious enthusiast. The Lady-in-Chief, who was to others a tower of strength, was to herself a weak vessel, praying continually for support, and conscious, with bitter intensity, of short-coming, of faithlessness, of rebellion to the will of God. Self-possessed in the presence of others, she was tortured and agonized, often to the verge of despair, in the solitude of her chamber. "I have done nothing for seven years," she said to a friend, "but write regulations." And that was broadly true of one side of her life. Of another side, she might have said with almost equal truth, "I have done nothing all my life but write spiritual meditations." She lived with a pen or pencil ever at her side; and reams of her paper are covered with confessions, self-examinations, communings with God. She suffered much, and especially during these years, from sleeplessness, and in the watches of the night she would turn to read the Mystics for comfort, or to write on her tablets for spiritual exercise. Though she liked best the books of the Catholic saints, her Catholicism was wider than theirs, and she could find spiritual kinship also, as in the lines prefixed to the present Part, with the hymns of American evangelists. At one and the same time mystic and practical administrator, Miss Nightingale had two soul-sides; but each was a reflection of the other. Her religion was her work; and her work was her religion. She read the Mystics, not to lull her active faculties into contemplative ecstasy, but to consecrate them to more perfect service. In one place she makes these notes from St. Catherine of Siena:--"It is not the occupation but the spirit which makes the difference. The election of a bishop may be a most secular thing. The election of a representative may be a religious thing. It is not the preluding such an election with public prayer that would make it a religious act. It is religious so far as each man discharges his part as a duty and a solemn responsibility. The question is not whether a thing is done for the State or the Church, but whether it is done with God or without God." Miss Nightingale's heading to this passage was "Drains." She applied her religion to every aspect of her life; and in her meditations, passages of solemn profundity are sometimes side by side with entries of a quaint, and almost humorous, directness, like a gargoyle above a church porch or a dog in a Madonna picture. "O Lord I offer him to Thee. He is so _heavy_. Do Thou take care of him. _I_ can't." "I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats." Such passages are thought "profane" by professors of a purely formal religion; but are characteristic of the true mystics in all denominations. The mystical self-abasement of the Saints was never more complete than in the private meditations of Florence Nightingale. Once in the middle of the night she started up and saw pictures on the wall by the night-light lamp. "Am I she who once stood on that Crimean height? 'The Lady with a Lamp shall stand.' The lamp shows me only my utter shipwreck." From the year 1872 onwards, when she went "out of office," and with increased intensity after her father's death, Miss Nightingale's mood, in all communings with herself, was of deep dejection and of utter humbleness. The notes are often heart-rending in their impression of loneliness, of craving for sympathy which she could not find, of bitter self-reproach. The loss of friends may account for something of all this, and even her friendship with Mr. Jowett had now lost somewhat of its consoling power. She felt that she gave more sympathy than she received; she sometimes found her interviews with him exhausting or disturbing; "he talks to me," she said once, "as if I were some one else." The strange manner of her life should be remembered. Her habit of seeing only one person at a time, and that at set times, must have made intercourse rather formidable for both parties. Nobody, even if staying in the house, ever _happened_ to come into her room, and no outside visitor appeared unexpectedly. She never had the relief of hearing two other people talk, or of witnessing, even for a moment, two other personalities in contact. Something too must be accounted to the fact that many of her meditations were written at night or in the early morning hours when she could not sleep. Periods of sleepless dejection, which in the lives of most men and women leave little record of themselves behind, were by her spent in writing down their weary tale. No doubt, the self-expression gave relief; and she would often turn at the instant from her tablets of despair to amuse a visitor with humorous conversation, or write a vivacious letter to a friend. These are considerations for which allowance must be made in estimating what was morbid in Miss Nightingale's moods. But for the most part the despondency and the self-abasement which coloured her meditations, and which sometimes appear in her letters, were the expression of the mystical way of her soul. They are the utterance of a soul which was striving after perfection, and found the path difficult and thorny. Miss Nightingale was masterful and eager; she had often been able to impress her will upon men and upon events; she found it difficult to bear disappointments and vexations with that entire resignation which the mystics taught her. She was "out of office"; she had been interrupted, suddenly and painfully, in a long career of almost unceasing action. The pause in her public life gave her new occasion for self-criticism and fresh consciousness of the difficulty of sustaining in active life that absolute purity of motive which makes light even of success or failure. She strove to attain, and she taught others to ensue, passivity in action--to do the utmost in their power, but to leave the result to a Higher Power. In a poem which gave her much comfort in later years she marked this passage:-- Abstaining from attachment to the work, Abstaining from rewardment in the work, While yet one doeth it full faithfully, Saying, "'Tis right to do!"--that is true act And abstinence! Who doeth duties so, Unvexed if his work fail, if it succeed Unflattered, in his own heart justified, Quit of debates and doubts, his is "true" act.[146] [146] Sir Edwin Arnold's _The Song Celestial_ (translated from the Mahâbhârata): see below, p. 401. But the lesson was hard to learn. "There are trying days before us," she wrote to one of her dearest friends (Aug. 1873); "however, we cannot change a single 'hair'; we must look to Him 'Alike who grasps eternity, And numbers every hair.' I don't know that it is ever difficult to me to entrust my 'hair' to Him, but to entrust A.'s, and yours, and poor matron's I find very difficult. And I thought He did not take care of B.'s hairs. What a reprobate I am!" And a worse "reprobate" than this letter says; for in fact she did find it very difficult to entrust even her own "hair to Him"--as she confessed in another letter to the same friend: "God is displeased when we enquire too anxiously. A soul which has really given itself to God does His will in the present, and trusts to the Father for the future. Now it is twenty years to-day [Aug. 11, 1873] since I entered 'public life'--and I have not learnt that lesson yet--though the greater part of those twenty years have been as completely out of my hands to mould, and in His alone, as if they had been the movements of the planets." The surrender of her will to the keeping of the Supreme Will was the spiritual perfection at which she most continuously aimed. In consciousness of failure, she reproached herself for censoriousness, rebellion, impatience. She knew that some of all this, and much of her dejection, were morbid, and warned others against the like weakness. "Do not depend, darling," she wrote to a friend, "upon 'light' in one sort of mystical way. There are things, as I know by experience, in which He sends us light by the hard good sense of others, not by our going over in sickness and solitude one thought, or rather feeling, over and over again by ourselves, which rather brings darkness. I have felt this so much in my lonely life." But there was another mystical way in which she found strength. In her spiritual life, which was at once the complement and the sustaining source of her outward life, she followed, as she was fond of writing, "the Way of the Cross." There were moments indeed, but they were rare, in which she was inclined to draw back, and when her faith grew faint. "O my Creator, art Thou leading every man of us to perfection? Or is this only a metaphysical idea for which there is no evidence? Is man only a constant repetition of himself? Thou knowest that through all these 20 horrible years [1873] I have been supported by the belief (I think I must believe it still or I am sure I could not work) that I was working with Thee who wert bringing every one, even our poor nurses, to perfection." Yet from every doubt her assurance grew the stronger; and as she followed the Way of the Cross, she rose triumphant over suffering, finding in each loss of human sympathy a lesson that she should throw herself more entirely into the Eternal Arms, and in every outbreak of human despondency or rebellion a call to closer union with the Eternal Goodness. "O Father, I submit, I resign myself," she wrote in one of hundreds of similar meditations, "I accept with all my heart this stretching out of Thy hand to save me: Deal with me as Thou seest meet: Thy work begin, Thy work complete. O how vain it is, the vanity of vanities, to live in men's thoughts, instead of God's." And again: "Wretch that I was not to see that God was taking from me all human help in order to compel me to lean on Him alone." She had little interest in rites and ceremonies as such, and she interpreted the doctrines of Christianity in her own way; but she found great comfort in the Communion Service, as an expression of the individual believer's participation in the sufferings and the triumph of the greatest of the Mystics. For some years she entered in her diary a text from the mystical writers for each day. She took to herself their devotion, their communion with God, their self-surrender; she adjusted their doctrine to her own beliefs. "I believe," she wrote, "in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His best son, our Master, who was born to show us the way through suffering to be also His sons and His daughters, His handmen and His handmaidens, who lived in the same spirit with the Father, that we may also live in that Holy Spirit whose meat was to do His Father's will and to finish His work, who suffered and died saying, 'That the world may love the Father.' And I believe in the Father Almighty's love and friendship, in the service of man being the service of God, the growing into a likeness with Him by love, the being one with Him in will at last, which is Heaven. I believe in the plan of Almighty Perfection to make us all perfect. And thus I believe in the Life Everlasting." This was the creed by which Miss Nightingale guided her life; this, the path to perfection along which she ever moved. There was nothing ecstatic in her mysticism, though she notes occasionally that she heard "The voice," and often that she was conscious of receiving "strong impressions." They were impressions which came in moments of imaginative insight, but yet which followed rationally from self-examination and meditation on her creed. Patience and resignation were the states of the purified soul which she found hardest of attainment. She marked for her edification many a passage from devotional writers in which such virtues are enjoined; as in this from Thomas à Kempis: "Oh Lord my God, patience is very necessary for me, for I perceive that many things in this life do fall out as we would not.... It is so, my son. But my will is that thou seek not that peace which is void of temptations, or which suffereth nothing contrary; but rather think that thou hast found peace, when thou art exercised with sundry tribulations and tried in many adversities." Her tribulations were often caused, she confessed, by her impatience. "O Lord, even now I am trying to snatch the management of Thy world out of Thy hands." The middle path of perfection between the acquiescence of the quietist and the impatience of the worker was hard. "Too little have I looked for something higher and better than my own work--the work of Supreme Wisdom, which uses us whether we know it or not. O God to Thy glory not to mine whatever happens, may be all my thought!" Miss Nightingale's meditations, written in the purgatorial stage, are many and poignant. But there were times also when the mount of illumination was reached, when "the palace of her soul" was enlarged to receive the indwelling Presence, and she found the perfect peace of the mystic in the consciousness of union with the Supreme Wisdom; times when on the wings of the soul she attained with Dante to the empyrean:-- Lume è lassù che visibile face Lo Creatore a quella creatura, Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace. Perfected in weakness, she was strong in moments of illumination "to see God in all things, and all things in God, the Eternal shining through the accidents of space and time." [147] [147] Letter to Mr. Jowett, April 17, 1873.