Part 3

At sunset, sitting upon her piazza at Oak Glen, her eyes fixed on the flaming sky beyond her pines, if she chanced to be alone, she would repeat an ode of Horace. She was learning one, line by line, when the summons came. I remember her saying that this made the thirtieth ode she had committed to memory. _Nous revenons á nos premiers amours_. Horace, the delight of her youth, consoled what might have been some lonely hours in her last days.

So much for the regular intellectual drill, by which she kept her mind delicately keen, as the soldier keeps his weapons for the fight, as the craftsman keeps the tools for his work. Admirable as this was, it was only the secondary source of her power. What was it fed the inner flame of her life so that it shone through her face, as fire shines through an alabaster vase?

She tapped the great life current that flows round the world; to those who know the trick, ’tis the simplest, most natural thing in the world to do, as easy as for the babe to draw the milk from its mother’s breast. You have merely to put yourself “on the circuit,” let the force universal flow through you, and you can move mountains or bridge oceans. She knew the trick; she was forever trying to teach it to others, to women in especial, to working women above all others.

Her first waking act was prayer, aspiration; her last, thanksgiving, praise! Just as some persons’ first action is to open the window and fill the lungs with fresh air, or to drink a glass of cold water, hers was to open wide the door of her soul and let the breath of the Spirit blow through it. She was a mystic, a seer. The Battle Hymn was not the only poem “given” her in the gray dawn of day when the birds were singing their matins; many of her best poems, her best thoughts came to her during the first moments of consciousness, when the Marthas of this world are wondering what they shall get for breakfast, or what clothes they shall put on. Poor Martha, dear Martha! Try for the uplift and the grace--they will come to you, even if yours is not the art to make a poem out of them. That is a special gift! Live your poem, and its music will turn the lives of those with whom you live from prose to poetry, change life’s water into wine.

She very rarely talked with her children on religious matters. Both she and my father had a dread of giving us the very narrow religious training they themselves had received. Conscious of the mistakes of such a bringing up, she shunned them and, though we all knew how devout a person she was, it was chiefly through her writings and her poems that we received a sense of the religious side of her nature. Her faith in a divine Providence was the deep well-spring in which the roots of her being were fixed. She lived in daily communion with the divine life. Her diary is full of dreams that are like the ecstatic visions of the old saints. In the note already referred to written on the margin of a poem in her posthumous volume, At Sunset, she says:

“The thought came to me that if God only looked upon me I should become radiant like a star.”

Beatrice, her favorite of Shakespeare’s heroines, says:

“There was a star danced and under that I was born!”

In October, the month she left us, a wonderful star appears in the heavens, and at this season of the year shines with an extraordinary brilliancy. She always watched for it and often pointed it out to others.

“What is the name of that star?” I have heard her ask more than one man of science. “It changes color like a flash light in a light house, flashes from white to green and then to red.” At last she asked the question of a man who could answer it and learned that her star’s name was Aldebaran and that is one of the stars of the constellation of Taurus. Her horoscope was never cast, but I believe that she was born under the influence of that wonderful star that flashes first the color of the diamond, then the ruby, and last the emerald, and that when she was born, Aldebaran danced!

Though she so rarely spoke of such matters, we who lived with her were fed at second hand by that deep limpid stream, the river of immortal life, in which she grew rooted deep. One of the many manifestations of this was the joyousness with which she took up each day and its little cares. She always came into the room in the morning like a child who has some good news to share with the family. Those wonderful spirits, that overflowed in every sort of wit, jest and antic, took the sting from the bitterest nature; in her company the satirist grew kind, the cynic humane. A deep spiritual joy seemed to enwrap her like a sort of enveloping climate. Where she was, the sun shone, the sky was blue, birds sang, brooks babbled, for so tremendous was her spiritual force that it always conquered. It sometimes seemed to me as if I was conscious of a sort of war of temperaments between her and some pessimistic or cynical nature. It was like one of those days when, as we say, “the sun is trying to come out.” The sun of her presence never failed to come out, to banish the gray fog of the blues, the sufferings of the irritable or the disheartened. When people came to talk to her of their troubles, as they often did, the troubles seemed to shrink like the clouds on a dark day, leaving first a little peep of blue visible, and finally the whole sky, clear and fervid.

One word more, take it as a legacy, a keepsake from her. I asked her for a statement of the ideal aim of life. She paused a moment, then summed up the mighty matter in one sentence, clear and cosmic as a single rain-drop, a very epitome of her own life:

“To Learn, To Teach, To Serve, And To Enjoy!”