Arts and Letters

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, the first woman to be honored by an election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was, like her friend Colonel Higginson, a representative of the best stock of Colonial America. Like him she lived to a great age, and received with unfeigned pleasure the homage of the third generation of writing men and writing women. Her first books and her earliest literary friendships date from that quaint New York of the forties, the Washington Irving period as it was about to vanish. Thenceforward her home was in Boston. Her marriage to Dr. Howe and her quick responsiveness to ethical impulses brought her into intimate relations with that restless, aspiring movement of reform which characterized New England for a score of years before and after the Civil War. Mrs. Howe flung herself with girlish enthusiasm into a dozen "causes," the education of the blind, the relief of the poor, the Americanization of foreigners, the liberalizing of religion, the emancipation of women, the movement for international peace. She was tireless, witty, undismayed, gifted with an amazing bodily endurance and a flashing radiance of spirit. She wrote essays, verses, sermons, and a play, but her fame as a writer rests almost wholly upon her Battle Hymn of the Republic. The poem was scribbled hastily in the gray dawn after a sound night's sleep. It was composed, like many of the songs of Burns, to a well-known tune. It interpreted, as no other lyric of the war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical glory of sacrifice for freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; women read it with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but truly perceiving in it, as thirty years before their fathers had perceived in Webster's Reply to Hayne, the idea of union made "simple, sensuous, passionate." No American poem has had a more dramatic and intense life in the quick-breathing imagination of men.

Mrs. Howe lived for half a century after her famous lyric was written, but the aureole of that one achievement rested over her until the end. She was a notable figure at public gatherings, and her commemorative verses on various centenary occasions were received with delight. She prepared a poem for the first meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters at Washington, in December, 1909. She was then eighty, and to the very close, in her public appearances, she preserved the clear, telling voice, the wit, the indomitable energy, of youth. A very human woman, a very feminine and wise woman, Mrs. Howe had a place all her own in the affectionate admiration of her contemporaries.