Early in 1861 the Duchess of Kent was taken seriously ill, and in March she died.

The event overwhelmed Victoria.

With a morbid intensity, she filled her diary for pages with minute descriptions of her mother's last hours, her dissolution, and her corpse, interspersed with vehement apostrophes, and the agitated outpourings of emotional reflection.

In the grief of the present the disagreements of the past were totally forgotten.

It was the horror and the mystery of Death--Death, present and actual--that seized upon the imagination of the Queen.