SHE MARRIED A REFORMER
Soon after the loss of her father, in 1839, Miss Ward paid the first of a series of visits to Boston, where she met, among other distinguished people who became life-long friends, Sarah Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1843 she was married to the director of the institute for the blind, in South Boston, the physician and reformer, Doctor Samuel G. Howe, of whom Sydney Smith spoke—referring to the remarkable results attained in his education of Laura Bridgman,—as “a modern Pygmalion who has put life into a statue.” Immediately after their marriage, Doctor and Mrs. Howe sailed for Europe, making London their first stopping place. There they met many famous men and women, among them Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Sydney Smith, Thomas Moore, the Duchess of Sutherland, John Forster, Samuel Rogers, Richard Monckton Milnes, and many others. After an extensive continental tour, including the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy, Doctor and Mrs. Howe returned home and took up their residence in South Boston.
One of her friends has said: “Mrs. Howe wrote leading articles from her cradle;” and it is true that at seventeen, at least, she was an anonymous but valued contributor to the New York Magazine, then a prominent periodical. In 1854, her first volume of poems was published. She named it “Passion Flowers,” and the Boston world of letters hailed her as a new poet. Though published anonymously, the volume at once revealed its author; and Mrs. Howe was welcomed into the poetic fraternity by such shining lights as Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, and Holmes. The poem by which the author will be forever enshrined in her country’s memory is, par excellence, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which, like Kipling’s “Recessional,” sang itself at once into the heart of the nation. As any sketch of Mrs. Howe would be incomplete without the story of the birth of this great song of America, it is here given in brief.