“I have got my last verse!”
She was much distressed that the poem appeared in Collier’s without the amended closing lines. The fault was mine; I had arranged with the editor Mr. Hapgood for its publication. She had done so much “free gratis” work all her life that it seemed fitting this poem should at least earn her, her travelling expenses.
“Let this be a lesson,” she said, “never print a poem or a speech till it has been delivered; always give the eleventh hour its chance!”
It may be interesting here to recall that the Atlantic Monthly paid her five dollars for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the only money she ever received for it.
Her power of keeping abreast of the times is felt in the Fulton poem, where she rounds out her eulogy of Fulton’s invention of the steamboat with a tribute to Peary. Only a few days before the news of our latest arctic triumph had flashed round the world, her world, whose business was her business as long as she lived in it; so into the fabric of the poem in honor of Fulton, she weaves an allusion to this new victory.
On her ninety-first birthday a reporter from a Boston paper asked her for a motto for the women of America. She was sitting on the little balcony outside her town house, reading her Greek Testament, when the young man was announced. She closed her book, thought for a moment, then gave the motto that so well expressed herself:
“Up to date!”
Was there ever anything more characteristic?
In December, 1909, the last December she was to see, she wrote a poem called “The Capitol,” for the first meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters at Washington. The poem, published in the Century Magazine for March, 1910, is as good as any she ever wrote, with one exception—the Battle Hymn; and that, as she has told us, “wrote itself.” She had arranged to go to Washington to read her poem before the Association. Though we feared the winter journey for her, she was so bent on going that I very reluctantly agreed to accompany her. A telegram, signed by William Dean Howells, Robert Underwood Johnson, and Thomas Nelson Page, all officers of the Association, urging her not to take the risk of so long a journey in winter, induced her to give up the trip. She was rather nettled by the kindly hint and flashed out:
“Hah! they think that I am too old, but there’s a little ginger left in the old blue jar!”