Julia Ward Howe Part 2

DEAREST MOTHER,-- ... I find myself better since I came hither....

Husband _more devoted than ever_; children sweet tho' something of a drawback on my recovery.... Thus in one page, you have the whole history of my present life, reading and thinking only excepted, which occupy by far the greatest portion of my time.... I was obliged to whip Julia yesterday afternoon, and have been sick ever since in consequence of the agitation it threw me into.... I felt _obliged_ to try Solomon's prescription, which had a worse effect on me than on her.... I think it is the last time, however, blow high or low, for she is as nervous as her mama was at her age, at the sight of a rod, and screamed herself almost to death; indeed her nerves were so affected that she cannot get over it and has cried all today, trembling as violently as if she had the ague all the time I whipped her and could not eat.

Julia was to retain through life the memories of the dear mother so early lost. She remembered her first sewing-lesson; how being told to take the needle in one hand she straightway placed the thimble on the other. She remembered her first efforts to say "mother," and how "muzzer" was all she could produce, till "the dear parent presently said, 'if you cannot do better than that, you will have to go back and call me "mamma."' The shame of going back moved me to one last effort, and, summoning my utmost strength of tongue I succeeded in saying 'mother.'"[8]

[8] _Reminiscences_, p. 8.

All devices to restore the young mother's failing strength were in vain: soon after giving birth to the fourth daughter, Ann Eliza, she died.

Her life had been pure, happy, and unselfish; yet her last hours were full of anguish. Reared in the strictest tenets of Evangelical piety, she was oppressed with terror concerning the fate of her soul; the sorrows of death compa.s.sed her about, the pains of h.e.l.l gat hold upon her. It is piteous to read of the sufferings of this innocent creature, as described by her mourning family; piteous, too, to realize, by the light of to-day, that she was almost literally _prayed to death_. She was twenty-seven years old when she died and had borne seven children.

Mr. Ward's grief at the death of this beloved wife was so extreme as to bring on a severe illness. For some time he could not bear to see the child who, he thought, had cost her mother's life; and though he gathered his other children tenderly around him, the little Annie was kept out of his sight.

By and by his father came to make him a visit and heard of this state of things. Going to the nursery, the old gentleman took the baby from its nurse, and carrying it into the room where his son sat desolate, laid it gently in his arms. From that moment the little youngest became almost his dearest care.

He could not live with his sorrow in the same dwelling that had contained his joy. The beautiful house at Bowling Green was sold, with the new furniture which had lately been ordered to please his Julia, and which the children never saw uncovered; and the family removed to Bond Street, then at the upper end of New York City.

"Mr. Ward," said his friends, "you are going out of town!"

Bond Street in the twentieth century is an unlovely thoroughfare, grimy, frowzy, given over largely to the sale of feathers and artificial flowers; Bond Street in the early part of the nineteenth century was a different affair.

The first settler in the street was Jonas Minturn, who about 1825 built No. 22. Mr. Ward came next. The city was then so remote, one could hardly see the houses to the south across the woods and fields.

The Ward children saw the street grow up around them; saw the dignified houses, brick or freestone, built and occupied by Kings, Halls, Morgans, Grinnells, most of all by Wards. Mr. Ward was then at No. 16; his father, the old Revolutionary soldier, soon came to live at No. 7, with his daughter Anne; his brother Henry was first at No. 14, then at No.

23; while his brother John was to make No. 8 a dwelling beloved by three generations.

Julia did not remember in what year her father bought the tract of land at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway. At first a large part of it was fenced in, and used as a riding-ring by the Ward boys. There was also, either here or at No. 16, something in the way of a garden, which she thus recalls in an address on horticulture, given in her later years:--

"My earliest horticultural recollections go back to an enclosure, usually called a yard, in the rear of my father's house in New York.

When my little brother and I were turned out to play there, we might just as well have picked the bugs off the rosebushes as the buds, of which we made wicked havoc. Not knowing what to do with the flower border, we barbarized instead of cultivating it. Being of extremely inquiring minds, we picked the larkspurs and laburnums to pieces, but became nothing the wiser for the process. A little daily tuition might have transformed us into a miniature Adam and Eve, and might have taught us some things that these old friends of ours did not know. But tuition to us then meant six or eight daily hours pa.s.sed in dry conversation with the family governess or French master. No one dreamed of turning the enamelled pages of the garden for us. We grew up consequently with the city measure of the universe--your own house, somebody else's, the trees in the park, a strip of blue sky overhead, and a great deal of talk about Nature read from the best authors. Much that is most beautiful in the works of all the poets was perfectly unintelligible to us, because we had never seen the phenomena referred to; or if we had seen them, we had not been taught to observe them. You will ask where we pa.s.sed our summers? In travelling, or at the seash.o.r.e, perhaps. But we took our city measure with us, and were never quite at home beyond its limits."

She adds: "I state these facts only to show how much of the world's beauty and value may be shut out from the eyes of a human being, by even a careful education! This loss cannot easily be remedied in later years.

I myself had reached mature life before I experienced the deep and calm enjoyments of country life. The long, still summer days, the open, fragrant fields, the shy wild blossoms, the song of birds; these won me at last to delight in them--at first they seemed to me only a void. It was a new gospel that the meadows taught me, and my own little children were its interpreters. I know now some country craft, and could even trim fruit trees and weed garden beds. But I have always regretted in this respect the lost time of youth. When I made acquaintance with Nature, I was too old to learn the skill of gardening. Year after year in the savage island of Newport, where labor is hard to hire, I have pa.s.sed summers ungladdened by so much as a hollyhock, and the garden I at last managed to secure owes nothing to my skill or knowledge."

The truth is, people were afraid of the open air in those days. Julia and her sisters sometimes went for a drive in pleasant weather, dressed in blue pelisses and yellow satin bonnets to match the chariot; they rarely went out on foot; when they did, it was in cambric dresses and kid slippers; the result was apt to be a cold or a sore throat, proving conclusively to the minds of their elders how much better off they were within doors.

Julia's nursery recollections were chiefly of No. 16 Bond Street. Here the little Wards lived a happy but somewhat sober life, under the watchful care of their father, and their faithful Aunt Eliza, known in the family as "Auntie Francis."

The young mother, in dying, had commended her children specially to the care of this, her eldest sister, whose ability had been tried and proved from childhood. In 1810 her father, Benjamin Clarke Cutler, died suddenly under singular and painful circ.u.mstances. Her mother, crushed by this event, took to her bed, leaving the care of the family to Eliza, then fifteen years of age. Eliza took up the house-mother's burden without question; nursed her mother, husbanded the narrow resources of the household, brought up the four younger children with a strong hand.

"There were giants in those days."

Nothing could daunt Eliza Cutler's spirits, which were a perpetual cordial to those around her. She was often "borrowed" by one member and another of the family; she threatened to hang a sign over her door with the inscription, "Cheering done here by the job by E. Cutler." Her tongue could be sharp as well as merry; witness many anecdotes.

The housekeeper of a certain millionnaire, calling upon her to ask the character of a servant, took occasion to enlarge upon the splendors of her employer's establishment. "Mr. So-and-So keeps this; Mr. So-and-So keeps that:--"

"Yes! yes!" said Mrs. Francis; "it is well known that Mr. So-and-So keeps everything, except the Ten Commandments!"

"Oh! Mrs. Francis, how _could_ you?" cried the poor millionnaire when next they met.

In 1829 Eliza Cutler married Dr. John Wakefield Francis, the historian of Old New York, the beloved physician of a whole generation. He was already, as has been seen, a member of the Ward household, friend and resident physician. His tremendous vitality, his quick sympathies, his amazing flow of vivid and picturesque language, made him the delight of the children. He called them by singular pet names, "Cream Cheese from the Dairy of Heaven," "Pocket Edition of Lives of the Saints," etc., etc. He sang to them odd s.n.a.t.c.hes of song which were to delight and exasperate later generations:--

"To woodman's hut one evening there came A physician and a dancing-master: The wind did blow, io, io, And the rain poured faster and faster."

Edgar Allan Poe said of Dr. Francis that his conversation was "a sort of Roman punch, made up of tragedy, comedy, and the broadest of all possible farce."

In those days "The Raven," newly published, was the talk of the town.

Dr. Francis, meeting Poe, invited him to come to his house on a certain evening, and straightway forgot the matter. Poe came at the appointed time. The Doctor, summoned to the bedside of a patient, left the drawing-room hastily, and in the anteroom ran into a tall, cadaverous figure in black. Seizing him in his arms, he carried him into the drawing-room and set him down before his wife. "Eliza, my dear--the Raven!" and he departed, leaving guest and hostess (the latter had never heard of "The Raven"!) equally petrified.

Mrs. Francis adored her husband, yet he must sometimes have tried her patience sorely. One evening they had a dinner party, eighteen covers, a state occasion. Midway in the repast the Doctor rose, and begging the guests to excuse him and his wife for a moment, led her, speechless with amazement, into the next room. Here he proceeded to bleed her, removing twelve ounces of blood; replying to her piteous protestations, "Madam, I saw that you were on the point of apoplexy, and I judge it best to avert it."

In strong contrast with "Uncle Doctor" was "Uncle Ben," the Reverend Benjamin Clarke Cutler, for many years rector of St. Anne's Church, Brooklyn. This uncle was much less to Julia's taste: indeed, she was known to stamp her childish foot, and cry, "I don't care for old Ben Cutler!" Nevertheless he was a saintly and interesting person.

He was twelve years old at the time of his father's tragic death, and was deeply influenced by it. His youth was made unhappy by spiritual anguish, duty to his widowed mother and the call to the ministry fighting within him. The latter conquered. In his twenty-first year he drew up, signed, and sealed "An Instrument of Solemn Surrender of Myself, Soul and Body, to G.o.d!" This doc.u.ment was in the form of a testament, in which he solemnly ("with death, judgment and eternity in view") gave, covenanted, and made over himself, soul and body, all his faculties, all his influence in this world, all the worldly goods with which he might be endowed, into the hands of his Creator, Preserver, and Constant Benefactor, to be his forever, and at his disposal. He goes on to say: "Witness, ye holy angels! I am G.o.d's servant; witness, thou, Prince of h.e.l.l! I am thy enemy, thy implacable enemy, from this time forth and forevermore."

That this covenant was well kept, no one who reads his memoirs and the testimony of his contemporaries can doubt.

There are many anecdotes of Uncle Ben. Once, during his early ministry, he was riding in a crowded stagecoach. One of the pa.s.sengers swore profusely and continuously, to the manifest annoyance of the others.

Presently Dr. Cutler, leaning forward, addressed the swearer.

"Sir," he said, "you are fond of blasphemy; I am fond of prayer. This is a public conveyance, and for the remainder of our journey, as often as you swear aloud, I shall pray aloud, and we will see who comes off best." The swearing stopped!

In his later years, he met one day a paris.h.i.+oner clad in deep mourning for a near relative. The old clergyman laid his hand on the c.r.a.pe sleeve. "What!" he said sternly. "Heathen mourning for a Christian saint!"

But of all the uncles (and there were many) the beloved Uncle John Ward was always first. Of him, through many years Julia's devoted friend and chief adviser, we shall speak later on.

We have dwelt upon the generation preceding our mother's, because all these people, the beautiful mother so early lost, so long loved and mourned, the sternly devoted father, the vivacious aunts, the stalwart uncles, were strong influences in the life of Julia Ward.

The amus.e.m.e.nts of the little Wards were few, compared with those of children of to-day. As a child of seven, Julia was taken twice to the opera, and heard Malibran, then Signorina Garcia, a pleasure the memory of which remained with her through life. About this time Mr. Ward's views of religious duty deepened in stringency and in gloom. There was no more opera, nor did Julia ever attend a theatre until she was a grown woman. In Low Church circles at that time, the drama was considered distinctly of the devil. The burning of the first Bowery Theatre and of the great theatre at Richmond, Virginia, were spoken of as "judgments."

Many an Evangelical pastor "improved" the occasions from the pulpit.

The child inherited a strong dramatic sense from the Marion Cutlers. She had barely learned to read when she found in an "Annual" a tale called "The Iroquois Bride," which she dramatized and presented to the nursery audience, with herself for the bride, her brother Marion for the lover, and a stool for the rock they ascended to stab each other. The performance was not approved by Authority, and the book was promptly taken away.

Her first written drama was composed at the age of nine, but even the name of it is lost.

Mr. Ward did not encourage intimacies with other children. He felt strongly that brothers and sisters were the true, and should be the only, intimates for one another; indeed, the six children were enough to make a pleasant little circle of their own, and there were merry games in the wide nursery. Sam, the eldest born, was master of the revels in childhood, as throughout his life. It was his delight, in the early morning, to wrap himself in a sheet, and bursting into the room where the little sisters slept, leap from bed to bed, announcing himself as a ghost come to haunt them; or, when the three ladies, Mrs. Mills, Mrs.

Brown, and Mrs. Francis (otherwise known as Julia, Louisa, and Annie) were playing with their dolls, to whisper in their ears that they must on no account venture near the attic stairs, as an old man in red was sitting there. Of course the little Fatimas must needs peep, and the old man was always there, a terrible figure, his face hidden. In "Bro'

Sam's" absence it was Marion who played the outlaw and descended like a whirlwind upon the unhappy ladies, who were journeying through dense and dreadful forests.

Mrs. Mills, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Francis were devoted mothers, and reared large families of dolls. They kept house in a wide bureau drawer, divided into three parts. Our Aunt Annie (Mrs. Adolphe Mailliard) writes: "Mrs. Mills' (Julia) dolls were always far more picturesquely dressed than ours, although I can say little for their neatness. Oh! to what numberless parties they went, and how tipsy they invariably got! I can see distinctly to-day the upset wagon (boxes, on spools for wheels), and the muddy dresses, for they always fell into mud puddles."

Marion was as pious as he was warlike. His morning sermons, delivered over the back of a chair, were fervent and eloquent; he was only seven years old when he wrote to his Cousin Henry Ward, who was ill with some childish ailment:--

"Do not forget to say your prayers every morning and evening. I hope that you trust in G.o.d; and, my dear cousin, do not set your mind too much on Earthly things! And my dear cousin, this is the prayer."

Follows the Lord's Prayer carefully written out. On the next page of the same sheet, the eight-year-old Julia adds her exhortation:--

"Dear Cousin, I hope that you will say the Prayer which my Brother has written for you. I hear with regret that you are sick, and it is as necessary as ever that you should trust in G.o.d; love him, dear Henry, and you will see Death approaching with joy. Oh, what are earthly things, which we must all lose when we die--to our immortal souls which never die! I cannot bear the thought of anybody who is dying without a knowledge of Christ. We may die before to-morrow, and therefore we ought to be prepared for death."