Julia Ward Howe Part 20

She lay perfectly still. Line by line, stanza by stanza, the words came sweeping on with the rhythm of marching feet, pauseless, resistless. She saw the long lines swinging into place before her eyes, heard the voice of the nation speaking through her lips. She waited till the voice was silent, till the last line was ended; then sprang from bed, and groping for pen and paper, scrawled in the gray twilight the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." She was used to writing thus; verses often came to her at night, and must be scribbled in the dark for fear of waking the baby; she crept back to bed, and as she fell asleep she said to herself, "I like this better than most things I have written." In the morning, while recalling the incident, she found she had forgotten the words.

The poem was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for February, 1862. "It was somewhat praised," she says, "on its appearance, but the vicissitudes of the war so engrossed public attention that small heed was taken of literary matters.... I knew and was content to know, that the poem soon found its way to the camps, as I heard from time to time of its being sung in chorus by the soldiers."

She did not, however, realize how rapidly the hymn made its way, nor how strong a hold it took upon the people. It was "sung, chanted, recited, and used in exhortation and prayer on the eve of battle." It was printed in newspapers, in army hymn-books, on broadsides; it was the word of the hour, and the Union armies marched to its swing.

Among the singers of the "Battle Hymn" was Chaplain McCabe, the fighting chaplain of the 122d Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He read the poem in the "Atlantic," and was so struck with it that he committed it to memory before rising from his chair. He took it with him to the front, and in due time to Libby Prison, whither he was sent after being captured at Winchester. Here, in the great bare room where hundreds of Northern soldiers were herded together, came one night a rumor of disaster to the Union arms. A great battle, their jailers told them; a great Confederate victory. Sadly the Northern men gathered together in groups, sitting or lying on the floor, talking in low tones, wondering how, where, why.

Suddenly, one of the negroes who brought food for the prisoners stooped in pa.s.sing and whispered to one of the sorrowful groups. The news was false: there had, indeed, been a great battle, but the Union army had won, the Confederates were defeated and scattered. Like a flame the word flashed through the prison. Men leaped to their feet, shouted, embraced one another in a frenzy of joy and triumph; and Chaplain McCabe, standing in the middle of the room, lifted up his great voice and sang aloud,--

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

Every voice took up the chorus, and Libby Prison rang with the shout of "Glory, glory, hallelujah!"

The victory was that of Gettysburg. When, some time after, McCabe was released from prison, he told in Was.h.i.+ngton, before a great audience of loyal people, the story of his war-time experiences; and when he came to that night in Libby Prison, he sang the "Battle Hymn" once more. The effect was magical: people shouted, wept, and sang, all together; and when the song was ended, above the tumult of applause was heard the voice of Abraham Lincoln, exclaiming, while the tears rolled down his cheeks,--

"Sing it again!"

(Our mother met Lincoln in 1861, and was presented to him by Governor Andrew. After greeting the party, the President "seated himself so near the famous portrait of Was.h.i.+ngton by Gilbert Stuart as naturally to suggest some comparison between the two figures. On the canvas we saw the calm presence, the serene a.s.surance of the man who had successfully accomplished a great undertaking, a vision of health and of peace. In the chair beside it sat a tall, bony figure, devoid of grace, a countenance almost redeemed from plainness by two kindly blue eyes, but overshadowed by the dark problems of the moment....

"When we had left the presence, one of our number exclaimed, 'Helpless Honesty!' As if Honesty could ever be helpless.")

The "Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Armenian. Written in the dark on a sc.r.a.p of Sanitary Commission paper, it has been printed in every imaginable form, from the beautiful parchment edition presented to the author on her seventieth birthday by the New England Woman's Club, down to the cover of a tiny brochure advertising a cure for consumption. It has also been set to music many times, but never successfully. It is inseparably wedded to the air for which it was written, an air simple, martial, and dignified: no attempt to divorce the two could ever succeed.

From the time of writing it to that of her death, she was constantly besieged by requests for autograph copies of part or the whole of the hymn. Sometimes the pet.i.tioners realized what they asked, as when Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote:--

"I can well understand what a Frankenstein's monster such a creation grows to be--such a poem as the 'Battle Hymn,' when it has become the sacred scroll of millions, each one of whom would fain obtain a copy of it."

Reasonable or unreasonable, she tried to meet every such request; no one can ever know how many times she copied the hymn, but if a record had been kept, some one with a turn for multiplication might tell us whether the lines put together made up a mile, or more, or less.

She wrote many other poems of the war, among them "The Flag," which is to be found in many anthologies. As the "Battle Hymn" was the voice of the nation's, so this was the expression of her own ardent patriotism:--

There's a flag hangs over my threshold Whose folds are more dear to me Than the blood that thrills in my bosom Its earnest of liberty.

And dear are the stars it harbors In its sunny field of blue, As the hope of a further Heaven That lights all our dim lives through.

This was no figure of speech, but the truth. The war and its mighty issues filled her heart and mind; she poured out song after song, all breathing the spirit of the time, the spirit of hope, resolve, aspiration. Everything she saw connected itself in some way with the great struggle. Seeing her daughters among their young friends, gay as youth must be gay, even in war-time, she cries out,--

Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms, To deck our girls for gay delights!

The crimson flower of battle blooms, And solemn marches fill the night.

Weave but the flag whose bars to-day Drooped heavy o'er our early dead, And homely garments, coa.r.s.e and gray, For orphans that must earn their bread![48]

[48] "Our Orders."

"The Jeweller's Shop in War-Time," "The Battle Eucharist," "The Harvard Student's Song," all reveal the deep feeling of her heart; we remember her singing of "Left Behind" (set to her own music, a wild, mournful chant) as something so thrilling that it catches the breath as we think of it.

Being again in Was.h.i.+ngton in the spring of 1863, she visited the Army of the Potomac, in company with the wife of General Francis Barlow, and wrote on her return a sketch of the expedition. She carried "a fine Horace, which repeatedly annoyed me by tumbling in the dirt, a volume of Sully's Memoirs, and a little f.a.g end of Spinoza, being his _Tractat_ upon the Old Testament."

She saw the working of the Sanitary Commission; saw "Fighting Joe"

Hooker, who looked like "the man who can tell nineteen secrets and keep the twentieth, which will be the only one worth knowing"; and William H.

Seward, "looking singularly like a man who has balanced a chip on the fence, and who congratulates himself upon its remaining there"; saw, too, from the heights above Fredericksburg (within the danger line!), an artillery skirmish.

Departing, she writes:--

"Farewell, bristling heights! farewell, sad Fredericksburg! farewell, river of sorrows; farewell, soldiers death-determined, upon whose mournful sacrifice we must shut unwilling eyes. Would it were all at end! the dead wept and buried, the living justified before G.o.d. For the deep and terrible secret of the divine idea still lies buried in the burning bosom of the contest. Suspected by the few, shunned by the many, it has not as yet leapt to light in the sight of all. This direful tragedy, in whose third dreary act we are, hangs all upon a great thought. To interpret this, through waste and woe, is the first moral obligation of the situation.... This terrible development of moral causes and effects will enchain the wonder of the world until the crisis of poetical justice which must end it shall have won the acquiescence of mankind, carrying its irresistible lesson into the mind of the critics, into the heart of the mult.i.tude."

CHAPTER IX

NO. 13 CHESTNUT STREET, BOSTON

1864; _aet._ 45

PHILOSOPHY

Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy!

Thy robe of serge hath lain beneath the stars; Thy weight of tresses, ponderously free, Of iron hue, no golden circlet bars.

Thy pale page, Study, by thy side doth hold, As by Cyprigna's her persuasive boy: Twin sacks thou bear'st; one doth thy gifts infold, Whose modest tendering proves immortal joy.

The other at thy patient back doth hang To keep the boons thou'rt wonted to receive: Reproof therein doth hide her venomed fang, And hard barbaric arts, that mock and grieve.

Here is a stab, and here a mortal thrust; Here galley service brought the age to loss; Here lies thy virgin forehead rolled in dust Beside the martyr stake of hero cross.

They who besmirched thy whiteness with their pitch, Thy gallery of glories did complete; They who accepted of thee so grew rich, Men could not count their treasures in the street.

Thy hollow cheek, and eye of distant light, Won from the chief of men their n.o.blest love; Olympian feasts thy temperance requite, And thy worn weeds a priceless dowry prove.

I know not if I've caught the matchless mood In which impa.s.sioned Petrarch sang of thee; But this I know,--the world its plenitude May keep, so I may share thy beggary.

J. W. H.

After the two real homes, Green Peace and Lawton's Valley, the Chestnut Street house was nearest to our hearts; this, though we were there only three years, and though it was there that we children first saw the face of sorrow. It was an heroic time. The Doctor was in constant touch with the events of the war. He was sent by Governor Andrew to examine conditions of camps and hospitals, in Ma.s.sachusetts and at the seat of war; he worked as hard on the Sanitary Commission, to which he had been appointed by President Lincoln, as on any other of his multifarious labors: his knowledge of practical warfare and his grasp of situations gave him a foresight of coming events which seemed well-nigh miraculous.

When he entered the house, we all felt the electric touch, found ourselves in the circuit of the great current.

So, these three years were notable for us all, especially for our mother; for beside these vital interests, she was entering upon another phase of development. Heretofore her life had been domestic, studious, social; her chief relation with the public had been through her pen. She now felt the need of personal contact with her audience; felt that she must speak her message. She says in her "Reminiscences": "In the days of which I now write, it was borne in upon me (as the Friends say) that I had much to say to my day and generation which could not and should not be communicated in rhyme, or even in rhythm."

The character of the message, too, was changing. In the anguish of bereavement she sought relief in study, her lifelong resource. Religion and philosophy went hand in hand with her. She read Spinoza eagerly: read Fichte, Hegel, Sch.e.l.ling; finally, found in Immanuel Kant a prophet and a friend. But it was not enough for her to receive; she must also give out: her nature was radiant. She must formulate a philosophy of her own, and must at least offer it to the world.

In September, 1863, she writes to her sister Louisa, "My Ethics are now the joke of my family, and Flossy or any child, wis.h.i.+ng a second helping, will say: 'Is it ethical, Mamma?' Too much of my life, indeed, runs in this channel. I can only hope that the things I write may do good to somebody, how much or how little we ourselves are unable to measure."

Yet she could make fun of her philosophers: _vide_ the following pa.s.sage from one of her "Tribune" letters:--

"We like to make a clean cut occasionally, and distinguish ourselves from our surroundings. Else, we and they get so wedded that we scarcely know ourselves apart. Do I own these four walls, or do they own me, and detain me here for their pleasure and preservation? Do I want these books, or do their ghostly authors seize me wandering near the shelves, impanel me by the b.u.t.ton-hole, and insist upon pouring their bottled-up wisdom into my pa.s.sive mind? I once read a terrible treatise of Fichte upon the _me and not me_, in which he gave so many reasons why I could not be the washstand, nor the washstand I, that I began after a while to doubt the fact. Had I read further, I think I should never have known myself from house-furniture again. Let me here remark that many of these gymnastics of German metaphysics seem to have no other office than that of harmlessly emptying the brain of all its electricity. Their battery strikes no hammer, turns no wheel. Fichte, having decided that he was not the washstand, smoked, took beer, and walked out to meet some philosophic friend, who, viewing himself _inclusive___, as the Germans say, thought he might be that among other things. Fatherland meantime going to the Devil--strong hands wanted, clear, practical brains,--infinitesimal oppression to be undermined, the century helped on. 'I am not the washstand,' says Fichte; 'I am everything,' says Hegel. Fatherland, take care of yourself. Yet who shall say that it is not a vital point to know our real selves from the fact.i.tious personalities imposed upon us, and to distinguish between the symptoms of our fancy and the valid phenomena of our lives?"

The Journal says:--