Then rose the cry of females, shrill,
As goss-hawks whistle on the hill,
Denouncing misery and ill,
Mingled with childhood’s bubbling thrill
Of curses stammered slow;
Answering, with imprecation dread,
“Sunk be his home in embers red,
And cursed be the meanest shed
That e’er shall hide his houseless head
We doom to want and woe!”
This was rather strong sentiment for a timid and sympathetic little girl, and she would probably have shuddered at it in prose; but in verse she probably committed it to memory as she was in process of copying it.
This completed the childhood work, and the book is filled, in her more mature hand, with complete poems, “The Pilgrim Fathers,—where are they?” “The Burial of Arnold,” “The Hour of Prayer,” “Warren at Bunker Hill,” “The Indian’s Lament,” “The Fall of Tecumseh,” and other poems, heroic, patriotic, devotional, and ending with “Farewell to the Bride.”
Later she procured a bound volume, and in it she copied her favorite poems, and wrote others of her own, in her most careful and painstaking hand. Her “copper-plate” penmanship was never more exquisite than in this volume, in which her own poems and the poems she loved are written in order as she found or composed them.
No quality in Clara Barton was more marked than the breadth of her sympathies. She shuddered at the thought of needless pain. I have a crude little picture, a page out of a child’s book, which she found in her childhood and preserved to the end of her life. It is entitled “What came of firing a gun.” A dead bird lies on the ground, and is approached on the one side by a boy with a gun in his hand and on the other by a horrified girl. It is not a great work of art, but it tells its story and conveys its lesson.
She never gave needless pain. She regarded all life as akin to the life of God, and sacred with the imprint of God’s own image. She looked upon all life that can suffer or enjoy, the life of bird and beast and fish, as something on which it is a sin to inflict needless pain.
From the time she saw, in her little girlhood, the killing of an ox, and felt that the blow that struck and crushed its skull had struck her own head, she never saw pain without feeling it. She could have said with Whitman of the suffering she saw—
My wounds on me grow livid as I lean
Upon my staff and look.
She did not merely sympathize with suffering; she suffered. She not only was glad of other people’s joy; it was her joy. She rejoiced with those that did rejoice and wept with those that wept. Not often do her diaries record her weeping; and the tears she records as having shed are oftener for others’ sorrows than for her own. Her sympathy was genuine, and of the sort which can truly be called vicarious. She took it upon herself.
Her sympathies were so strong that she would have been useless in the presence of danger and pain but for her remarkable self-control. I asked her once how she acquired this, and she said it was simply by forgetting herself. She saw something that needed to be done, and went about the doing of it so promptly, so completely absorbed by the necessity of it, that she forgot to be horrified by the sight of blood, forgot to faint as timid females were supposed to do. Days and weeks and months and years of it she would endure and never once give way. Then would come a revulsion and a horror and a weakness and a collapse. Again and again she held herself in hand through nervous strain that would have crushed most women or men, and when it was all over went nervously to pieces.