The Queen laid the first stone of the Mausoleum in Frogmore Gardens on Saturday. In this receptacle Prince Albert's remains and her own are ultimately to be deposited. The whole Household in Waiting attended the ceremony, and all those who had been in any way connected with the Prince, such as the bailiffs of Osborne and Balmoral, were summoned. Sydney tells me this Mausoleum had been determined upon before the Prince's death. I think these German fancies are much to be regretted, as keeping up a morbid and artificial sort of grief which in the case of the Queen will be of considerable inconvenience. She has visited the tomb and strewn flowers over the coffin, with which also the bed in which the Prince died is decked, and which she and the Royal children constantly renew, and his rooms are left exactly in the state they were in at the moment of his death.
A letter from Fanny Kemble, begun at Philadelphia and finished at Washington, received this morning, says: “The war seems to be approaching a crisis. The Northern troops are gradually surrounding the Southern forces, and there have been some very important advantages gained by the Federal Army, which indicate, I think, a termination, by no means remote, of the contest. A very important entrenched camp called Fort Donnelson, in Tennessee, which commands the entrance into the heart of the Southern country, and the approach to Nashville (a place of great importance), have just been taken by the Northern troops. They have also invested the city of Savannah, and the news of its surrender is hourly expected. In short, I think the clouds are bursting, and very decided daylight approaching. The end of the Civil War will leave the Government burthened with questions of infinite difficulty to deal with, but it will have been worth two good results to the American Nation. The theory of State Rights and the practice of slavery have both, I think, received their death-blow, and the efforts and sacrifices which the Northern States have made with such extraordinary energy and devotion will enhance for many a long year the value of the Union in the hearts and minds of the people. I arrived here yesterday (Washington); the whole road from Philadelphia to this place is a string of camps and military stations, sometimes only a small cluster of tents peering from the banks on the railroad track. The weather has been frightful, and the melting of the snow and the coming up of the frost out of the ground have left the surface of it one mud-bed, and the poor soldiers looked forlorn enough in their plank houses, which seemed but sorry shelter for such a season. They had huge wood fires blazing at all their posts, however, which, as evening came on, looked very picturesque. Wherever the train stopped, eager requests were made by the soldiers who crowded round it for newspapers, which the passengers gave them.
I bestowed a ‘Times’ on them. I did not think the American news would edify them much, but thought they might be the better for reading the history of the Hartley Colliery catastrophe. You cannot imagine how strange all this sudden apparition of warlike life is here, where till within the last year such a thing as a real soldier was never seen! President Lincoln has made a suggestion that pecuniary compensation should be offered to any State which will abolish slavery. This has made a great sensation in America, but is here considered quite impracticable and as a bait to the Border States to return to their allegiance to the Union.”
SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1861-1872, pp. 30-2
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