“One chosen lover, one chosen philosopher!” was her motto. While she owed much to Spinoza and records in her journal that Kant does not do him justice, her philosopher par excellence was Immanuel Kant. On her seventieth birthday the Saturday Morning Club of Boston gave her a beautiful jewel with seven moonstones and one topaz. At a dinner soon after she wore this jewel to pin a lace scarf. The conversation at table turned on Kantian philosophy and she was asked some question concerning it.
“Do you think I wear the Categorical Imperative on my left shoulder?” she cried.
“Is this the Categorical Imperative?” asked Mrs. Whitman, pointing to the jewel that held the lace. After that the club’s jewel went by the name of one of the toughest nuts in Kant’s philosophy.
When she was fifty years old she learned Greek; from the time she could read it fluently, the Greek philosophers, historians, and dramatists shared with the Germans those precious hours of morning study. In the end the Hellenes routed the Teutons, and remained her most cherished intimates. At luncheon she would tell us what she had been studying, an excellent way to teach children history. I shall never forget the day when she had read in Xenophon’s Anabasis the account of the retreat of the Greeks, who formed part of the expedition of Cyrus. She came dancing into the dining room, where the children were waiting for their soup, waving her beautiful hands and crying:
“Thalatta! Thalatta!” the cry of the wearied Greeks on first catching sight of the sea, after wandering for years in the interior of the Persian empire.
No event in history is quite so real to me as Hannibal’s crossing the Alps. Day by day she took us with that valiant Carthaginian general on his long journey across Hispania, over the Pyrenees, through Gaul, along the Rhone, and over the Graian Alps. The day Hannibal finally got his elephants over the Little Saint Bernard Pass, and down into Italy, was one of positive rejoicing for us little ones. Her imagination was so keen that when she repeated to us what she had been studying, it always seemed as if she had seen these things with her own eyes, not merely read about them. The effort of studying Greek whetted her mind to its keenest edge. Aristotle and Plato, with her Greek Testament, she read to the last. She talked with us less about the philosophers than the dramatists and historians. I remember how much we heard about the Birds of Aristophanes, one of her favorite classics. Reading Greek was, I think, the greatest pleasure of her later life. One afternoon last summer, when a pretty girl of a studious turn came to see her, I chanced to hear her parting words, said with a fervor and solemnity that impressed the young visitor:
“Study Greek, my dear, it’s better than a diamond necklace!”
After the morning plunge into Greek or German philosophy “to tone up her mind,” she took up whatever literary task she was at work upon, “put the iron on the anvil,” as her phrase was, “and hammered” at it till luncheon. She was a most careful and conscientious writer, writing, rewriting, and “polishing” her work with inexhaustible patience. Occasionally she got a poem all whole, in one piece, like The Battle Hymn. This was rare though; as a rule she toiled and moiled over her manuscripts. In the afternoon she was at her desk again, unless there was some outside engagement—answering letters, reading books in a lighter vein, Italian poetry, a Spanish play, a book of travels or, best of all, a good French novel.
Each day opened with the stern drill of the Greek or German philosophy, by which her mind was exercised and at the same time stored with the thoughts of the wise, the labors of the good, the prayers of the devout. That was the first process, the taking in, receiving the wisdom of the ages. Then came the second or creative process, when she gave out even as she had received. This regular mental exercise was like a series of gymnastics, by widen the receptive and creative functions of the brain were kept in perfect working order. If you are to pour out, you must first pour in. If your lamp is to serve as a beacon light, it must be well trimmed and filled with oil every day.
She never in my memory took up any work after dark. Unless she was called abroad by some festivity or meeting, the evening was our play time. She invariably dressed for dinner, which was followed by talk, whist, music, and reading aloud. She rarely used the precious daylight for reading English novels, so at night she was ready to listen to some “rattling good story” recommended by one of the grandchildren. She delighted in Stevenson, Crawford, Cable, Barrie, Stanley Weyman, Conan Doyle, Meredith, Tolstoi and Sienkiewicz. How she loved the friends of bookland, the friends who never hurt or bore! The new ones were welcome, but she was faithful to the old and liked nothing better than to reread those masterpieces of her youth, the novels of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray. We read Pickwick every year or two; she never wearied of the greatest English novelist’s greatest masterpiece. A good ghost story made her flesh creep; she was often kept awake by the troubles of the “people in the book,” who were so real to her that, when they were having a very bad time of it, she would spread her hands before her face and cry out: