Though we have room for few incidents of this period, there is one too charming to be omitted. A friend went to a flower merchant on Broadway to buy a bunch of violets for Mrs. Child's birthday. Incidentally, the lady mentioned Mrs. Child; she may have ordered the flowers sent to her house. When the lady came to pay for them, the florist said, "I cannot take pay for flowers intended for her. She is a stranger to me, but she has given my wife and children so many flowers in her writings, that I will never take money of her." Another pretty incident is this: an unknown friend or admirer always sent Mrs. Child the earliest wild flowers of spring and the latest in autumn.
I have said that one of her passions was music, which happily she now has opportunities to gratify. "As for amusements," she says, "music is the only thing that excites me.... I have a chronic insanity with regard to music. It is the only Pegasus which now carries me far up into the blue. Thank God for this blessing of mine." I should be glad if I had room for her account of an evening under the weird spell of Ole Bull. Her moral sense was keener than her æsthetic, but her æsthetic sense was for keener than that of the average mortal. Sometimes she felt, as Paul would have said, "in a strait betwixt two"; in 1847 she writes Mr. Francis G. Shaw: "I am now wholly in the dispensation of art, and therefore theologians and reformers jar upon me." Reformer as she was and will be remembered, she was easily drawn into the dispensation of art; and nature was always with her, so much so that Col. Higginson says, "She always seemed to be talking radicalism in a greenhouse."
Mr. and Mrs. Child retired from the Standard in 1849. Her next letters are dated from Newton, Mass. Her father was living upon a small place—a house and garden—in the neighboring town of Wayland, beautifully situated, facing Sudbury Hill, with the broad expanse of the river meadows between. Thither Mrs. Child went to take care of him from 1852 to 1856, when he died, leaving the charming little home to her. There are many traditions of her mode of life in Wayland, but her own account is the best: "In 1852, we made our humble home in Wayland, Mass., where we spent twenty-two pleasant years, entirely alone, without any domestic, mutually serving each other and depending upon each other for intellectual companionship." If the memory of Wayland people is correct, Mr. Child was not with her much during the four years that her father lived. Her father was old and feeble and Mr. Child had not the serene patience of his wife. Life ran more easily when Mr. Child was away. Whatever other period in the life of Mrs. Child may have been the most satisfactory, this must have been the most trying.
Under date of March 23, 1856, happily the last year of this sort of widowhood, she writes: "This winter has been the loneliest of my life. If you knew my situation you would pronounce it unendurable. I should have thought so myself if I had had a foreshadowing of it a few years ago. But the human mind can get acclimated to anything. What with constant occupation and a happy consciousness of sustaining and cheering my poor old father in his descent to the grave, I am almost always in a state of serene contentment. In summer, my once extravagant love of beauty satisfies itself in watching the birds, the insects, and the flowers in my little patch of a garden." She has no room for her vases, engravings, and other pretty things; she keeps them in a chest, and she says, "when birds and flowers are gone, I sometimes take them out as a child does its playthings, and sit down in the sunshine with them, dreaming over them."
We need not think of her spending much time dreaming over her little hoard of artistic treasures. Her real business in this world is writing the history of all religions, or "The Progress of Religious Ideas in Successive Ages." It was a work begun in New York, as early as 1848, finished in Wayland in 1855, published in three large octavo volumes and, whatever its merits or success, was the greatest literary labor of her life.
Under date of July 14, 1848, she writes to Dr. Francis: "My book gets slowly on.... I am going to tell the plain, unvarnished truth, as clearly as I can understand it, and let Christians and Infidels, Orthodox and Unitarians, Catholics, Protestants, and Swedenborgians growl as they like. They will growl if they notice it at all: for each will want his own theory favored, and the only thing I have conscientiously aimed at is not to favor any theory at all." She may have failed in scientific method; but here is a scientific spirit. "In her religious speculations," says Whittier, "Mrs. Child moved in the very van." In Wayland, she considered herself a parishioner of Dr. Edmund H. Sears, whom she calls, "our minister," but she was somewhat in advance of Dr. Sears. Her opinions were much nearer akin to those of Theodore Parker. Only a Unitarian of that type could perhaps at this early period have conceived the history of religion as an evolution of one and the same spiritual element "through successive ages."
She had not much time to dream over her chest of artistic treasures when the assault of Preston S. Brooks upon Senator Sumner called her to battle of such force and point that Dr. William H. Furness said, it was worth having Sumner's head broken.
When death released her from the care of her father, she took "Bleeding Kansas" under her charge. She writes letters to the newspapers; she sits up till eleven o'clock, "stitching as fast as my fingers could go," making garments for the Kansas immigrants; she "stirs up the Wayland women to make garments for Kansas"; she sends off Mr. Child to make speeches for Kansas; and then she writes him in this manner: "How melancholy I felt when you went off in the morning darkness. It seemed as if everything about me was tumbling down; as if I were never to have a nest and a mate any more." Surely the rest of this letter was not written for us to read: "Good, kind, magnanimous soul, how I love you. How I long to say over the old prayer again every night. It almost made me cry to see how carefully you had arranged everything for my comfort before you went; so much kindling stuff split up and the bricks piled up to protect my flowers." Here is love in a cottage. This life is not all prosaic.
Old anti-slavery friends came to see her and among them Charles Sumner, in 1857, spent a couple of hours with her, and left his photograph; she met Henry Wilson at the anti-slavery fair and talked with him an "hour or so." Whittier says, "Men like Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrew availed themselves of her foresight and sound judgment of men and measures."
When John Brown was wounded and taken prisoner at Harper's Ferry, nothing was more in character for Mrs. Child than to offer her services as his nurse. She wrote him under cover of a letter to Gov. Wise, of Virginia. The arrival of Mrs. Brown, made Mrs. Child's attendance unnecessary, but the incident led to a lively correspondence between Mrs. Child and Gov. Wise, in which Mrs. Senator Mason, of Virginia, joined. Neither of her distinguished correspondents possessed the literary skill of Mrs. Child. The entire correspondence was collected in a pamphlet of which 300,000 copies were sold. On a visit to Whittier at Amesbury, a delegation from a Republican political meeting called upon her, saying they wanted to see the woman who "poured hot shot into Gov. Wise."