Learned even beyond advanced college graduates of to-day, an accomplished linguist, a musical amateur of great promise, the young and beautiful Miss Julia Ward, of Bond street, soon became a leader of the cultured and fashionable circle in which she moved. In the series, “Authors at Home,” by M. C. Sherwood, we get a glimpse of her, about that time, in a whimsical entry from the diary of a Miss Hamilton, written at the time of the return of Doctor Howe, from Greece, whither he had gone to fight the Turks:—
“I walked down Broadway with all the fashion and met the pretty blue stocking, Miss Julia Ward, with her admirer, Doctor Howe, just home from Europe. She had on a blue satin cloak and a white muslin dress. I looked to see if she had on blue stockings, but I think not. I suspect that her stockings were pink, and she wore low slippers, as grandmamma does. They say she dreams in Italian and quotes French verses. She sang very prettily at a party last evening. I noticed how white her hands were. Still, though attractive, the muse is not handsome.”
SHE MARRIED A REFORMER
Soon after the loss of her father, in 1839, Miss Ward paid the first of a series of visits to Boston, where she met, among other distinguished people who became life-long friends, Sarah Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1843 she was married to the director of the institute for the blind, in South Boston, the physician and reformer, Doctor Samuel G. Howe, of whom Sydney Smith spoke—referring to the remarkable results attained in his education of Laura Bridgman,—as “a modern Pygmalion who has put life into a statue.” Immediately after their marriage, Doctor and Mrs. Howe sailed for Europe, making London their first stopping place. There they met many famous men and women, among them Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Sydney Smith, Thomas Moore, the Duchess of Sutherland, John Forster, Samuel Rogers, Richard Monckton Milnes, and many others. After an extensive continental tour, including the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy, Doctor and Mrs. Howe returned home and took up their residence in South Boston.
One of her friends has said: “Mrs. Howe wrote leading articles from her cradle;” and it is true that at seventeen, at least, she was an anonymous but valued contributor to the New York Magazine, then a prominent periodical. In 1854, her first volume of poems was published. She named it “Passion Flowers,” and the Boston world of letters hailed her as a new poet. Though published anonymously, the volume at once revealed its author; and Mrs. Howe was welcomed into the poetic fraternity by such shining lights as Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, and Holmes. The poem by which the author will be forever enshrined in her country’s memory is, par excellence, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which, like Kipling’s “Recessional,” sang itself at once into the heart of the nation. As any sketch of Mrs. Howe would be incomplete without the story of the birth of this great song of America, it is here given in brief.
STORY OF THE “BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC”
It was in the first year of our Civil War that Mrs. Howe, in company with her husband and friends, visited Washington. During their stay in that city, the party went to see a review of troops, which, however, was interrupted by a movement of the enemy, and had to be put off for the day. The carriage in which Mrs. Howe was seated with her friends was surrounded by armed men; and, as they rode along, she began to sing, to the great delight of the soldiers, “John Brown.” “Good for you!” shouted the boys in blue, who, with a will, took up the refrain. Mrs. Howe then began conversing with her friends on the momentous events of the hour, and expressed the strong desire she felt to write some words which might be sung to this stirring tune, adding that she feared she would never be able to do so. “She went to sleep,” says her daughter, Maude Howe Eliot, “full of thoughts of battle, and awoke before dawn the next morning to find the desired verses immediately present to her mind. She sprang from her bed, and in the dim gray light found a pen, and paper, whereon she wrote, scarcely seeing them, the lines of the poem. Returning to her couch, she was soon asleep, but not until she had said to herself, ‘I like this better than anything I have ever written before.’”
“EIGHTY YEARS YOUNG”
Of Mrs. Howe it may very fittingly be said that she is eighty years young. Her blue eye retains its brightness, and her dignified carriage betokens none of the feebleness of age. Above all, her mind seems to hold, in a marvelous degree, its youthful vigor and elasticity; a fact that especially impressed me as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” expressed her views on the desirability of a college training for girls.
“The girls who go to college,” said Mrs. Howe, “are very much in request, I should say for everything,—certainly for teaching. Then, naturally, if they wish to follow literature, they have a very great advantage over those who have not had the benefit of a college course, having a liberal education to begin with.”