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.