She gave a funny little French gesture of the shoulders, inherited with so much else from her Huguenot ancestors, of whom she knew little and thought much. It meant, I suppose:
“When you have learned Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish and Italian, you will have learned how to spell English—perhaps!”
At sunset, sitting upon her piazza at Oak Glen, her eyes fixed on the flaming sky beyond her pines, if she chanced to be alone, she would repeat an ode of Horace. She was learning one, line by line, when the summons came. I remember her saying that this made the thirtieth ode she had committed to memory. Nous revenons á nos premiers amours. Horace, the delight of her youth, consoled what might have been some lonely hours in her last days.
So much for the regular intellectual drill, by which she kept her mind delicately keen, as the soldier keeps his weapons for the fight, as the craftsman keeps the tools for his work. Admirable as this was, it was only the secondary source of her power. What was it fed the inner flame of her life so that it shone through her face, as fire shines through an alabaster vase?
She tapped the great life current that flows round the world; to those who know the trick, ’tis the simplest, most natural thing in the world to do, as easy as for the babe to draw the milk from its mother’s breast. You have merely to put yourself “on the circuit,” let the force universal flow through you, and you can move mountains or bridge oceans. She knew the trick; she was forever trying to teach it to others, to women in especial, to working women above all others.
Her first waking act was prayer, aspiration; her last, thanksgiving, praise! Just as some persons’ first action is to open the window and fill the lungs with fresh air, or to drink a glass of cold water, hers was to open wide the door of her soul and let the breath of the Spirit blow through it. She was a mystic, a seer. The Battle Hymn was not the only poem “given” her in the gray dawn of day when the birds were singing their matins; many of her best poems, her best thoughts came to her during the first moments of consciousness, when the Marthas of this world are wondering what they shall get for breakfast, or what clothes they shall put on. Poor Martha, dear Martha! Try for the uplift and the grace—they will come to you, even if yours is not the art to make a poem out of them. That is a special gift! Live your poem, and its music will turn the lives of those with whom you live from prose to poetry, change life’s water into wine.
She very rarely talked with her children on religious matters. Both she and my father had a dread of giving us the very narrow religious training they themselves had received. Conscious of the mistakes of such a bringing up, she shunned them and, though we all knew how devout a person she was, it was chiefly through her writings and her poems that we received a sense of the religious side of her nature. Her faith in a divine Providence was the deep well-spring in which the roots of her being were fixed. She lived in daily communion with the divine life. Her diary is full of dreams that are like the ecstatic visions of the old saints. In the note already referred to written on the margin of a poem in her posthumous volume, At Sunset, she says:
“The thought came to me that if God only looked upon me I should become radiant like a star.”
Beatrice, her favorite of Shakespeare’s heroines, says:
“There was a star danced and under that I was born!”