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: