Part 2

During her last years she received many letters, even printed documents, with minute inquiries touching her method of life. A society of Nonogenarians sent a set of questions about her habits of body, and mind, with a postscript asking especially to what she attributed her unusually prolonged activity. Though I am sure she must have answered, for she was faithful beyond belief in such matters, we have found no record of her answer. Now she has left us, her children are often asked the same sort of question about her:

“How did she do it?”

“What was her secret?”

“Why did she die ninety-one years young, instead of ninety-one years old?”

If she herself had tried to tell you her secret, to account for her rare powers preserved so late in life, spent so prodigally at an age when the lean and slippered pantaloon hoards his scant store of strength as a miser hoards his gold, she would have said something like this:

“You must remember I had a splendid Irish wet-nurse!”

Perhaps she laid too much stress on that excellent woman’s share in making her all she was (no foster-mother was ever more faithfully remembered by nursling); she owed something, surely, to her forebears. She came of good old fighting stock; in her veins thrilled the blood of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of Virginia, of General Greene, both heroes of the Revolution, of that staunch old rebel, Roger Williams, of the Wards, for two generations colonial Governors of Rhode Island. All this fighting blood, together with her red hair, gave a certain militant touch to her character; she was a good fighter for every just cause, especially the cause of Peace. Though she spoke oftener of the Irish wet-nurse than of her ancestors, she did not altogether forget them as an anecdote told by my sister, Mrs. Richards, proves. They were at some meeting, a religious gathering I think, where one speaker--rather an effete pessimist--closed a speech in the key of the “Everlasting No,” with the doleful words:

“I feel myself weighed down by a sense of the sins of my ancestors.”

My mother, who was the next speaker, sprang to her feet with the retort:

“And I feel myself lifted up on the virtues of mine!”

There rang out the key-note of her life, the “Everlasting Yea,” the trumpet-tone to which all high souls rally.

Many people have had fine wet-nurses; a legion have the same legacy of power in their blood, who do not accomplish much with it.

_Poeta nascitur, non fit!_ She was of course born an uncommon person, but I believe the manner and habits of her life, quite as much as her native power, made for her vigorous old age. As I look back on the intimate compan companionship of a lifetime, I realize that these excellent life habits, habits that any one of us can cultivate, had even more to do with her long continued usefulness than the great Irish wet-nurse herself.

First, and last, and all the time, she worked, and worked, and worked, steadily as nature works, without rest, without haste. She was never idle, she was never in a hurry. Though she played too, earnestly, enthusiastically, it was never idle play; there was always a dash of poetry in her pastime, whether it was making a charade for the Brain Club, or composing a nursery rhyme for her grandchildren. The capacity for work like everything else grows by cultivation. She started life with a rarely active mind and temperament. So do many people. It was the habit of study, of concentration, of work, carefully cultivated from the first, held on to in spite of difficulties--she had plenty of them--that wrought what seemed to some of her contemporaries a miracle. She could say like Adam in Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It:”

“My age is as a lusty winter; Frosty, but kindly: let me go with you; I’ll do the service of a younger man In all your business and necessities.”

“Let me go with you!” This is what Age is forever saying to Youth. “Do not leave me behind--I can still serve!” So long as Age makes good the claim, heydey, headlong, good-natured Youth lets the veteran march in its glorious ranks. Youth does not crowd him out, as the veteran too often thinks, he drops out because he “cannot keep the pace!” The reason she did not drop out was because she made good her claim. The children and grandchildren of those with whom she first enlisted, were content to have her march with them, still in the van.

Her training, from her very start in life, made her a cosmopolitan; one of the factors of this world citizenship was her very early study of foreign languages. French, Italian and Latin she knew almost from the time she could speak, so that she gathered into her spirit the essence of the race genius of the Latins. Later came the Teutonic baptism, for she only learned German at fourteen, when her adored brother, Sam Ward, came home from Heidelberg, brimming over with the songs, the poetry, the philosophy of Germany. She studied Schiller and Goethe with ardor--among her treasures, we have found a long autograph letter from Goethe to her tutor, Dr. Cogswell. In her youth there were still cultivated French people living in New York, who had taken refuge there during the reign of terror. She remembered one of these gentlemen in exile who gave her French lessons, another who came to the house when there was a dinner party to mix the salad, a third who came to dress her hair for a ball. Then there were a group of Italian political exiles who were made welcome at her father’s house, and the Greek boy (a fugitive from the unspeakable Turk), Christy Evangelides, adopted by him, who till the day of his death spoke of her as his sister Julia. All these early influences tended to make a cosmopolitan of the little lady while she was still in the nursery. The general culture of the “little old New York” of that time was far broader than that of Boston; the narrow swaddling bands of Puritan provincialism never bound her free and vaulting spirit. From world citizenship to universal citizenship, to other world citizenship is a far cry. There are men and women with a truly cosmopolitan spirit who never attain that wider universal citizenship. She often quoted Margaret Fuller’s “I accept the universe.” Though keenly aware of the manner in which Margaret had laid herself open to ridicule by this high-sounding phrase, without herself formulating it (her sense of humor could never have allowed that), she practically did “accept the universe,” was always conscious of a sort of universal citizenship that made the affairs of every oppressed people her affairs. No hand, however dirty, was ever stretched out to her that she did not take it in her own and in taking it recognize the God in the man. She carried a touchstone in her bosom by which she found gold in natures that to others seemed trivial and base. She had few intimate friends, none in the usual sense of the term, for with all her bonhommie that made her the “friend of all the world,” the Universal Friend was her only real intimate. Her reserve of soul was impenetrable; only her poems, and occasionally a page in her diary, give us any insight into her spiritual nature--glimpses of a certain high companionship with the stars and the planets.

We hear much of the dual nature of man. The term misleads. Man, or at least woman has a triple nature, is made up of flesh, mind and spirit. How did she use these three different natures--the physical, the intellectual, the spiritual?

In her youth the views of health were very different from what they are now. As a child, she lived the greater part of the year in New York, where she was never encouraged to take much outdoor air or exercise. Every afternoon at three o’clock the big yellow and blue family coach, drawn by two fat horses, came to the door to take the children out for a drive. Even when they went to the country for a change of air, the children’s complexions were more considered than their health. Miss Danforth, an old friend of the family, told my mother in later years of having met the Wards at the seaside, where Julia, who had a delicate ivory complexion, wore a thick green worsted veil when she went down to the beach.

“Little Julia has another freckle today,” the visitor was told. “It was not her fault, the nurse forgot her veil.”

She was from the first a natural student, loving her books better than anything else; but she was a perfectly normal child too and her good spirits and her social gifts often tempted her from her work. Her sister Louisa remembered that she used to make her maid tie her into her chair, so that she should not be able to leave her study should the temptation assail her. In spite of a too sedentary youth, she started life with an uncommonly good body. After her marriage to my father she received many new and valuable ideas on matters hygienic, and while never a great pedestrian she always walked twice a day till the very end of her life. Still it must be confessed that her muscles were the least developed part of her. For the last twenty years she was rather lame, the result of a fall, when her knee was badly injured. She was always persistent in walking as much as she was able however, in spite of the effort it cost her. During the summer and autumn, she passed a large part of the day, studying and reading, on the piazza of her country house at Oak Glen in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

Though for many years she left the housekeeping to the daughter or granddaughter who was living with her, she always kept her own bank account and never allowed any one to take charge of her finances. She often lamented that her hands were so useless for household tasks, envying her granddaughters’ dexterity with scissors and needle. I must not forget to mention her practising. She had a beautiful voice which had been carefully trained in the old Italian method. She practised her scales regularly all her life; I have often heard her say she believed the exercise of singing was very valuable in preparing her for public speaking. She was faithful too in practising on the piano, and always played her scales so that her fingers never lost their flexibility or the power to do the things she really wanted them to do--to hold the pen (she almost never dictated, but wrote everything with her own hand), to play the piano, to accompany her speaking with appropriate gestures. To the last her hands retained their exquisite shape; the cast made from them after death shows their unimpaired beauty. My father was very strict about diet; all “fried abominations” were taboo with him, pastry, high seasoning, ham, cocoanut cakes--all rich food--were anathema maranatha. From first to last she was frankly a rebel in this matter. It was said, in the family, that she had the digestion of an ostrich. In spite of all opposition she calmly continued to eat whatever she fancied to the end of her life. During her last summer she wrote to her physician asking permission to eat ham and pastry, dishes that to her daughters seemed a little heavy for summer weather. At her last luncheon party she was advised not to eat pâté de foies gras or to drink champagne; she put aside the advice with the familiar remark we all knew so well:

“I have taken these things all my life and they have never hurt me.”

The fact of the matter was, she had a perfect digestion which she used carefully and never abused. She ate moderately and slowly, with an entire disregard to what is usually considered good for old people. She rose at seven; in her youth and middle age she took a cold bath, in later years the bath was tepid--well or ill, it was never omitted. During the last twenty years, that great fourth score so rich in happiness to herself and her family, and that greater family of hers, the Public, she took a little light wine with her dinner, “for her stomach’s sake,” as she would say, quoting St. Paul. This, with a cup of tea for breakfast, was the only stimulant she needed, for her spirits were so buoyant, her temperament so overflowing with the _joie de vivre_, that we called her the “family champagne.” Breakfast with us was a social meal; there was always conversation and much laughter for she came down in the morning with her spirits at their highest level. She slept about eight hours. Until her seventieth year I never knew her to lie down in the daytime, unless she was suffering with headache. The first part of that seventieth year was not a good time for her. More hearty healthy people are killed every year by the sentence: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten,” than by any four diseases you like to name. Even her radiant health, her buoyant temperament felt its depressing influence; as the weeks and months went by and she found herself quite as vigorous in her seventieth year as she had been in her sixty-ninth, she forgot all about her age and resumed her activities, retaining under protest the daily nap. She lay down with the clock on the bed beside her; twenty minutes was quite time enough to “waste in napping!” During the last five or six years, always grudgingly, she gave a little more time to resting, taking a half-hour’s siesta before luncheon, another before dinner, “to rest her back.” She always sat in a straight backed chair, never in her long life having learned how to “lounge” in an easy chair. She was by nature a night owl and never wanted to go to bed if there was any other night owl to keep her company. So much for her use of that faithful servant, the body. If the development of her muscles was not quite up to the modern standard, her intellectual training far surpassed it. From first to last she kept her mind in the same state of high training that the athlete keeps his body, strove for that perfect balance of power in all the different functions of the brain that an all-round athlete aims for in his physique. I never remember a time when she relaxed the mental gymnastics that kept her mind strong, supple, active.

Once, at a crucial moment, when beset by perplexities, I asked for advice, her answer, stamped on my memory as long as it shall hold together, was given in three Latin words:

“_Posce fortem animum._” Ask for a strong mind! The motto of her English friend, Edward Twistleton, known and loved by her generation of Bostonians.

Ask for a strong mind; ask earnestly enough and you will get it, will learn to laugh at that old-fashioned bogey, the fear of being considered “strong-minded.”

Long ago, when a silly acquaintance demanded if it was true she was a strong-minded woman, she parried with the counter thrust:

“Is it not better to be strong-minded than to be weak-minded?”

If you want a strong mind or a strong body there is only one way to get it, by faithful exercise. There is no royal road, no easy short cut to either goal. The wise friend, the good physician can point out the way, you yourself must tread it!

She always read her letters and the newspapers (history in the making) immediately after breakfast. Then came the morning walk, a bout of calisthenics, or a game of ball; after this she settled to the real serious business of the day; ten o’clock saw her at her desk. She began the morning with study, took up the hardest reading she had on hand. In her youth she read Goethe; in her middle life, when she was deep in the study of German philosophy, Kant, Fichte or Hegel. For years Kant was the most intimate companion of her thought. In the early sixties, when she was in the forties, her diary was filled with Kant’s philosophy. Sometimes she differs with his conclusions, sometimes amplifies them, oftenest endorses them.

“One chosen lover, one chosen philosopher!” was her motto. While she owed much to Spinoza and records in her journal that Kant does not do him justice, her philosopher par excellence was Immanuel Kant. On her seventieth birthday the Saturday Morning Club of Boston gave her a beautiful jewel with seven moonstones and one topaz. At a dinner soon after she wore this jewel to pin a lace scarf. The conversation at table turned on Kantian philosophy and she was asked some question concerning it.

“Do you think I wear the Categorical Imperative on my left shoulder?” she cried.

“Is this the Categorical Imperative?” asked Mrs. Whitman, pointing to the jewel that held the lace. After that the club’s jewel went by the name of one of the toughest nuts in Kant’s philosophy.

When she was fifty years old she learned Greek; from the time she could read it fluently, the Greek philosophers, historians, and dramatists shared with the Germans those precious hours of morning study. In the end the Hellenes routed the Teutons, and remained her most cherished intimates. At luncheon she would tell us what she had been studying, an excellent way to teach children history. I shall never forget the day when she had read in Xenophon’s Anabasis the account of the retreat of the Greeks, who formed part of the expedition of Cyrus. She came dancing into the dining room, where the children were waiting for their soup, waving her beautiful hands and crying:

“Thalatta! Thalatta!” the cry of the wearied Greeks on first catching sight of the sea, after wandering for years in the interior of the Persian empire.

No event in history is quite so real to me as Hannibal’s crossing the Alps. Day by day she took us with that valiant Carthaginian general on his long journey across Hispania, over the Pyrenees, through Gaul, along the Rhone, and over the Graian Alps. The day Hannibal finally got his elephants over the Little Saint Bernard Pass, and down into Italy, was one of positive rejoicing for us little ones. Her imagination was so keen that when she repeated to us what she had been studying, it always seemed as if she had seen these things with her own eyes, not merely read about them. The effort of studying Greek whetted her mind to its keenest edge. Aristotle and Plato, with her Greek Testament, she read to the last. She talked with us less about the philosophers than the dramatists and historians. I remember how much we heard about the Birds of Aristophanes, one of her favorite classics. Reading Greek was, I think, the greatest pleasure of her later life. One afternoon last summer, when a pretty girl of a studious turn came to see her, I chanced to hear her parting words, said with a fervor and solemnity that impressed the young visitor:

“Study Greek, my dear, it’s better than a diamond necklace!”

After the morning plunge into Greek or German philosophy “to tone up her mind,” she took up whatever literary task she was at work upon, “put the iron on the anvil,” as her phrase was, “and hammered” at it till luncheon. She was a most careful and conscientious writer, writing, rewriting, and “polishing” her work with inexhaustible patience. Occasionally she got a poem all whole, in one piece, like The Battle Hymn. This was rare though; as a rule she toiled and moiled over her manuscripts. In the afternoon she was at her desk again, unless there was some outside engagement--answering letters, reading books in a lighter vein, Italian poetry, a Spanish play, a book of travels or, best of all, a good French novel.

Each day opened with the stern drill of the Greek or German philosophy, by which her mind was exercised and at the same time stored with the thoughts of the wise, the labors of the good, the prayers of the devout. That was the first process, the taking in, receiving the wisdom of the ages. Then came the second or creative process, when she gave out even as she had received. This regular mental exercise was like a series of gymnastics, by widen the receptive and creative functions of the brain were kept in perfect working order. If you are to _pour out_, you must first _pour in_. If your lamp is to serve as a beacon light, it must be well trimmed and filled with oil every day.

She never in my memory took up any work after dark. Unless she was called abroad by some festivity or meeting, the evening was our play time. She invariably dressed for dinner, which was followed by talk, whist, music, and reading aloud. She rarely used the precious daylight for reading English novels, so at night she was ready to listen to some “rattling good story” recommended by one of the grandchildren. She delighted in Stevenson, Crawford, Cable, Barrie, Stanley Weyman, Conan Doyle, Meredith, Tolstoi and Sienkiewicz. How she loved the friends of bookland, the friends who never hurt or bore! The new ones were welcome, but she was faithful to the old and liked nothing better than to reread those masterpieces of her youth, the novels of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray. We read Pickwick every year or two; she never wearied of the greatest English novelist’s greatest masterpiece. A good ghost story made her flesh creep; she was often kept awake by the troubles of the “people in the book,” who were so real to her that, when they were having a very bad time of it, she would spread her hands before her face and cry out:

“Stop! Stop! I cannot endure it!”

Money troubles of hero or heroine especially afflicted her; this was odd, for she bore the loss of the greater part of her own fortune with courage and equanimity. Though she knew the value of money, and practised the most touching little economies so that she might have more to give away, she cared very little about money and was always too busy with more important matters to think much of it. The stories of arctic adventure, Jack London’s especially, “gave her the shivers;” she ached with the cold and hunger of his dogs and heroes. The younger people among the listeners often envied her enthusiasm. Her imagination was so keen, her power of making believe the story was real so tantalizing, infectious too, that it carried us through many a book that would have been dull without it.

One of the last books she enjoyed was Dr. Morton Prince’s Dissociation of a Personality. She was deeply interested in this last word on psychology and every day at luncheon gave us an account of Sally’s last prank.

In her later years, though she wrote much poetry, she did not read as much English verse as in her youth. I do not know at what period she studied Shakespeare, but she was so familiar with the plays that at the theatre I have often heard her murmur a correction of a line falsely given by some player. Her memory was prodigious; it was like a vast collection of pigeon-holes, where there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. She seemed to have a sort of mental card-catalogue of all the knowledge that was stored away in her capacious brain. It was as if the subjects were all classified, and when she wished to speak, write or think on any given one, she consulted the catalogue, then went straight to the alcove in that well stored library and brought forth volume after volume dealing with the subject under consideration. It will hardly be believed that she wrote her volume of Reminiscences entirely from memory, never so much as consulting her own diary. It has been said of her that she remembered all she ever knew, whereas most of us forget a large part of what we have known. She certainly had an unusual command of her own knowledge. On one of my long absences in Europe, I had taken with me by mistake her large Worcester’s dictionary, thinking it was mine. On my return after an absence of more than two years, I exclaimed:

“How dreadful it was of me to take your dictionary--what have you done--did you buy a new one?”

“I did not know you had taken it,” she said.

“But--how did you get along without a dictionary?”

She was surprised at the question.

“I never use a word whose meaning I do not know.”

“But the spelling?”

She gave a funny little French gesture of the shoulders, inherited with so much else from her Huguenot ancestors, of whom she knew little and thought much. It meant, I suppose:

“When you have learned Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish and Italian, you will have learned how to spell English--perhaps!”