Though she was seventy-seven in the year of the war with Spain, she was active in sharing the hardships of the American soldiers in Cuba, nursing Roosevelt’s Rough Riders along with the rest of the sick and wounded at the front.
Though she lived to be over ninety, honored and beloved by millions for her constant labors of love and mercy, Clara Barton did not live to see, in the World War, the most wonderful carrying out of all her plans for soldiers on the field and in the hospital. The beautiful woman known as “the World Mother,” pictured on the poster displayed to raise money and supplies for the Red Cross work in America, might well have been the portrait of Clara Barton, for no woman in all history has done more to relieve and heal the sufferings of mankind. The millions upon millions of men, women, and children now numbered in the membership of the American Red Cross Society, by giving, knitting, rolling bandages, or buying Red Cross stamps and Christmas seals, are carrying on the work begun by the frail, sickly, bashful little girl whose yearning heart and busy hands gave her the name of the “Angel of the Battlefield.”
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW, THE AMERICAN CHILDREN’S POET
LIVING in Portland, Maine, a town of rare beauty, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could hardly have helped being a poet, even if he had tried. He was born in a big, square, three-story house, close to the edge of Casco Bay, one of the largest and loveliest harbors in the world. Portland stands on several wooded hills, overlooking the bay, which is said to contain three hundred and sixty-five small islands—one for every day in the year. On the blue water the green islands sparkle like emeralds on a shining sea of sapphire.
From the highest point on Great Diamond, one of the larger islands in the harbor, little Henry could see, sometimes, as the sun was setting behind the hills of Portland, the hazy blue and pink outlines of the White Mountains, more than a hundred miles away. Any boy with eyes and heart to take in the deep meaning of it all would have wanted to be a poet. Henry’s inner nature throbbed in response to the beauties of Nature without, and because he had the gift of putting his feelings into words, he was a poet long before he or those around him realized it.
Like the boy Benjamin Franklin and the boy George Washington, who lived about a hundred years before him, the Longfellow boy had the best chances to hear the sailors who came into port tell their tales of the sea—of pirates and hairbreadth adventures.
Henry’s grandfather—his mother’s father—was bluff old General Peleg Wadsworth, a hero of the Revolutionary War. He could tell stories of the struggle for independence that would have fired the soul of any boy.
