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The eleventh hour in the life of Julia Ward Howe
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“I pray for many things this year. For myself, I ask continued health of mind and body, work, useful, honorable and as remunerative as it shall please God to send. For my dear family, work of the same description with comfortable wages, faith in God, and love to each other. For my country, that she may keep her high promise to mankind, for Christendom, that it may become more Christlike, for the struggling nationalities, that they may attain to justice and peace.”
Not vain the prayer! Health of mind and body was granted, work, useful, honorable, if not very remunerative, was hers that year and nearly five years more, for she lived to be ninety-one and a half years old. When Death came and took her, he found her still at work. Hers the fate of the happy warrior who falls in thick of battle, his harness on his back.
How did she do it?
Hardly a day passes that I am not asked the question!
Shortly before her death, she spoke of the time when she would no longer be with us--an almost unheard-of thing for her to do. We turned the subject, begged her not to dwell on it.
“Yes!” she laughed with the old flash that has kindled a thousand audiences, “it’s not my business to think about dying, it’s my business to think about living!”
This thinking about living, this tremendous vitality had much to do with her long service, for the important thing of course was not that she lived ninety-one years, but that she worked for more than ninety-one years, never became a cumberer of the earth, paid her scot till the last. She never knew the pathos of doing old-age work, such as is provided in every class for those inveterate workers to whom labor is as necessary as bread or breath. The old ploughman sits by the wayside breaking stones to mend the road others shall travel over; the old prima donna listens to her pupils’ triumphs; the old statesman gives after-dinner speeches, or makes himself a nuisance by speaking or writing, ex cathedra, on any question that needs airing, whether it is his subject or not; she did good, vigorous work till the end, in her own chosen callings of poet and orator. What she produced in her last year was as good in quality as any other year’s output. The artist in her never stopped growing; indeed, her latest work has a lucidity, a robust simplicity, that some of the earlier writings lack.
In the summer of 1909 she was asked to write a poem on Fulton for the Fulton-Hudson celebration. Ever better than her word, she not only wrote the poem, but recited it in the New York Metropolitan Opera House on the evening of September 9th. Those who saw her, the only woman amid that great gathering of representative men from all over the world, will not forget the breathless silence of that vast audience as she came forward, leaning on her son’s arm, and read the opening lines:
A river flashing like a gem, Crowned with a mountain diadem,--
or the thunders of applause that followed the last lines:
While pledge of Love’s assured control, The Flag of Freedom crowns the pole.
The poem had given her a good deal of trouble, the last couplet in especial. The morning of the celebration, when I went into Mrs. Seth Low’s spare bedroom to wake her, she cried out:
“I have got my last verse!”
She was much distressed that the poem appeared in Collier’s without the amended closing lines. The fault was mine; I had arranged with the editor Mr. Hapgood for its publication. She had done so much “free gratis” work all her life that it seemed fitting this poem should at least earn her, her travelling expenses.
“Let this be a lesson,” she said, “never print a poem or a speech till it has been delivered; always give the eleventh hour its chance!”
It may be interesting here to recall that the Atlantic Monthly paid her five dollars for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the only money she ever received for it.
Her power of keeping abreast of the times is felt in the Fulton poem, where she rounds out her eulogy of Fulton’s invention of the steamboat with a tribute to Peary. Only a few days before the news of our latest arctic triumph had flashed round the world, her world, whose business was her business as long as she lived in it; so into the fabric of the poem in honor of Fulton, she weaves an allusion to this new victory.
On her ninety-first birthday a reporter from a Boston paper asked her for a motto for the women of America. She was sitting on the little balcony outside her town house, reading her Greek Testament, when the young man was announced. She closed her book, thought for a moment, then gave the motto that so well expressed herself:
“Up to date!”
Was there ever anything more characteristic?
In December, 1909, the last December she was to see, she wrote a poem called “The Capitol,” for the first meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters at Washington. The poem, published in the Century Magazine for March, 1910, is as good as any she ever wrote, with one exception--the Battle Hymn; and that, as she has told us, “wrote itself.” She had arranged to go to Washington to read her poem before the Association. Though we feared the winter journey for her, she was so bent on going that I very reluctantly agreed to accompany her. A telegram, signed by William Dean Howells, Robert Underwood Johnson, and Thomas Nelson Page, all officers of the Association, urging her not to take the risk of so long a journey in winter, induced her to give up the trip. She was rather nettled by the kindly hint and flashed out:
“Hah! they think that I am too old, but there’s a little ginger left in the old blue jar!”
She never thought of herself as old, therefore she never was really old in the essentials. Her iron will, her indomitable spirit, held her frail body to its duty till the very end.
“Life is like a cup of tea, the sugar is all at the bottom!” she cried one day. This was the very truth; she knew no “winter of discontent.” Her autumn was all Indian summer, glorious with crimson leaves, purple and gold sunsets.
In April, 1910, she wrote the third and last of her poems to her beloved friend and “Minister” James Freeman Clarke. She read this poem twice, at the centenary celebration of Mr. Clarke’s birth held at the Church of the Disciples, April 3rd, and the day after at the Arlington St. Church. Compared with the verses written for Mr. Clarke’s fiftieth birthday and with those celebrating his seventieth birthday, this latest poem is to me the best. The opening lines bite right into the heart of the matter; as she read them standing in the pulpit a thrill passed through the congregation of her fellow disciples gathered together in memory of their founder.
Richer gift can no man give Than he doth from God receive. We in greatness would have pleasure, But we must accept our measure. Let us question, then, the grave, Querying what the Master gave, Whom, in his immortal state, Grateful love would celebrate.
Only human life was his, With its thin-worn mysteries.
Lifting from the Past its veil, What of his does now avail? Just a mirror in his breast That revealed a heavenly guest, And the love that made us free Of the same high company.
The poem on Abraham Lincoln written for the Lincoln Centenary and read by her at the meeting in Symphony Hall, Boston, February 12th, 1909, is perhaps the best of the innumerable memorial poems she composed. As one by one the centenaries of this and that member of the band of great men and women who made our country illustrious in the 19th Century were celebrated, it came to be considered as a matter of course that she, almost the last survivor of that noble company, should write a poem for the occasion. So difficult a critic as Professor Barrett Wendell said to me that he considered some of the stanzas of the Lincoln poem as good as the Battle Hymn. I remember he particularly liked the last two verses,
A treacherous shot, a sob of rest, A martyr’s palm upon his breast, A welcome from the glorious seat Where blameless souls of heroes meet; And, thrilling through unmeasured days, A song of gratitude and praise; A cry that all the earth shall heed, To God, who gave him for our need.
During her last summer she was in correspondence with her friend Mr. Garrison about the publication of a volume that should gather up into one sheaf these scattered occasional poems. She had this much on her mind and made every endeavor to collect the poems together: some of them had never been printed, and of others she possessed no copy. She stopped in Boston on her way to Smith College in the last days of last September, and spent an afternoon in her Beacon St. house looking for some of those lost poems. Her wish was fulfilled, and the posthumous volume, to which we gave the title “At Sunset,” lies beside me. Look down the page of contents and note how various are the names that figure in the list of personal poems, and what a wide range of character they show; beginning with Lincoln, Doctor Holmes, Washington Allston, Robert E. Lee, Whittier, Lucy Stone, Phillips Brooks, Robert Browning, Archbishop Williams, and ending with Michael Anagnos--this is a wide swath to cut, wide as her own sympathy.
One poem of hers that has soothed many a wounded heart should be better known than I believe it to be. Though it has no dedication, it might well be dedicated to the men and women who have tried, and who to the world seem to have tried in vain.
Endeavor
“What hast thou for thy scattered seed, O Sower of the plain? Where are the many gathered sheaves Thy hope should bring again?” “The only record of my work Lies in the buried grain.”
“0 Conqueror of a thousand fields! In dinted armor dight, What growths of purple amaranth Shall crown thy brow of might?” “Only the blossom of my life Flung widely in the fight.”
“What is the harvest of thy saints, O God! who dost abide? Where grow the garlands of thy chiefs In blood and sorrow dyed? What have thy servants for their pains?” “This only,--to have tried.”
On the 26th of July, 1908, she wrote: “The thought came to me that if God only looked upon me, I should become radiant like a star.” This thought is embodied in the following quatrain.
Wouldst thou on me but turn thy wondrous sight, My breast would be so flooded by thy light, The light whose language is immortal song, That I to all the ages should belong.
Two lines of hers have always seemed to me to express above all others her life’s philosophy:
In the house of labor best Can I build the house of rest!
Of all her labors, heavy and varied as those of Hercules, her poetry was what she loved best. But she lived in an age when there are few who can take their spiritual meat in verse. The age of steel is an age of prose, and so she labored in season and out to give her message in prose as well as in poetry, with the spoken word as well as the written. She was the most willing of troubadours; she hastened gladly wherever she was called, whether it was to some stately banquet of the muses like the Bryant Centenary, or to a humble company of illiterate negroes, in the poor little chapel at Santo Domingo, where she preached all one season. Whether some rich and powerful association like the Woman’s Club at Chicago summoned her or some modest group of working women on Cape Cod, she was always ready. She asked no fee, but accepted what was given her. She spoke and wrote oftenest for love, and next often for an honorarium of five dollars. The first need of her being was to give. So much had been given to her that she was forever trying to pay the debt by giving of her store to others. I find in her own handwriting the best expression of this need of giving, that was perhaps the prime necessity of her life.
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