Many people have had fine wet-nurses; a legion have the same legacy of power in their blood, who do not accomplish much with it.
Poeta nascitur, non fit! She was of course born an uncommon person, but I believe the manner and habits of her life, quite as much as her native power, made for her vigorous old age. As I look back on the intimate compan companionship of a lifetime, I realize that these excellent life habits, habits that any one of us can cultivate, had even more to do with her long continued usefulness than the great Irish wet-nurse herself.
First, and last, and all the time, she worked, and worked, and worked, steadily as nature works, without rest, without haste. She was never idle, she was never in a hurry. Though she played too, earnestly, enthusiastically, it was never idle play; there was always a dash of poetry in her pastime, whether it was making a charade for the Brain Club, or composing a nursery rhyme for her grandchildren. The capacity for work like everything else grows by cultivation. She started life with a rarely active mind and temperament. So do many people. It was the habit of study, of concentration, of work, carefully cultivated from the first, held on to in spite of difficulties—she had plenty of them—that wrought what seemed to some of her contemporaries a miracle. She could say like Adam in Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It:”
“My age is as a lusty winter;
Frosty, but kindly: let me go with you;
I’ll do the service of a younger man
In all your business and necessities.”
“Let me go with you!” This is what Age is forever saying to Youth. “Do not leave me behind—I can still serve!” So long as Age makes good the claim, heydey, headlong, good-natured Youth lets the veteran march in its glorious ranks. Youth does not crowd him out, as the veteran too often thinks, he drops out because he “cannot keep the pace!” The reason she did not drop out was because she made good her claim. The children and grandchildren of those with whom she first enlisted, were content to have her march with them, still in the van.
Her training, from her very start in life, made her a cosmopolitan; one of the factors of this world citizenship was her very early study of foreign languages. French, Italian and Latin she knew almost from the time she could speak, so that she gathered into her spirit the essence of the race genius of the Latins. Later came the Teutonic baptism, for she only learned German at fourteen, when her adored brother, Sam Ward, came home from Heidelberg, brimming over with the songs, the poetry, the philosophy of Germany. She studied Schiller and Goethe with ardor—among her treasures, we have found a long autograph letter from Goethe to her tutor, Dr. Cogswell. In her youth there were still cultivated French people living in New York, who had taken refuge there during the reign of terror. She remembered one of these gentlemen in exile who gave her French lessons, another who came to the house when there was a dinner party to mix the salad, a third who came to dress her hair for a ball. Then there were a group of Italian political exiles who were made welcome at her father’s house, and the Greek boy (a fugitive from the unspeakable Turk), Christy Evangelides, adopted by him, who till the day of his death spoke of her as his sister Julia. All these early influences tended to make a cosmopolitan of the little lady while she was still in the nursery. The general culture of the “little old New York” of that time was far broader than that of Boston; the narrow swaddling bands of Puritan provincialism never bound her free and vaulting spirit. From world citizenship to universal citizenship, to other world citizenship is a far cry. There are men and women with a truly cosmopolitan spirit who never attain that wider universal citizenship. She often quoted Margaret Fuller’s “I accept the universe.” Though keenly aware of the manner in which Margaret had laid herself open to ridicule by this high-sounding phrase, without herself formulating it (her sense of humor could never have allowed that), she practically did “accept the universe,” was always conscious of a sort of universal citizenship that made the affairs of every oppressed people her affairs. No hand, however dirty, was ever stretched out to her that she did not take it in her own and in taking it recognize the God in the man. She carried a touchstone in her bosom by which she found gold in natures that to others seemed trivial and base. She had few intimate friends, none in the usual sense of the term, for with all her bonhommie that made her the “friend of all the world,” the Universal Friend was her only real intimate. Her reserve of soul was impenetrable; only her poems, and occasionally a page in her diary, give us any insight into her spiritual nature—glimpses of a certain high companionship with the stars and the planets.
We hear much of the dual nature of man. The term misleads. Man, or at least woman has a triple nature, is made up of flesh, mind and spirit. How did she use these three different natures—the physical, the intellectual, the spiritual?
In her youth the views of health were very different from what they are now. As a child, she lived the greater part of the year in New York, where she was never encouraged to take much outdoor air or exercise. Every afternoon at three o’clock the big yellow and blue family coach, drawn by two fat horses, came to the door to take the children out for a drive. Even when they went to the country for a change of air, the children’s complexions were more considered than their health. Miss Danforth, an old friend of the family, told my mother in later years of having met the Wards at the seaside, where Julia, who had a delicate ivory complexion, wore a thick green worsted veil when she went down to the beach.
“Little Julia has another freckle today,” the visitor was told. “It was not her fault, the nurse forgot her veil.”
She was from the first a natural student, loving her books better than anything else; but she was a perfectly normal child too and her good spirits and her social gifts often tempted her from her work. Her sister Louisa remembered that she used to make her maid tie her into her chair, so that she should not be able to leave her study should the temptation assail her. In spite of a too sedentary youth, she started life with an uncommonly good body. After her marriage to my father she received many new and valuable ideas on matters hygienic, and while never a great pedestrian she always walked twice a day till the very end of her life. Still it must be confessed that her muscles were the least developed part of her. For the last twenty years she was rather lame, the result of a fall, when her knee was badly injured. She was always persistent in walking as much as she was able however, in spite of the effort it cost her. During the summer and autumn, she passed a large part of the day, studying and reading, on the piazza of her country house at Oak Glen in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.