



Produced by Chuck Greif (This file was produced from images
available at The Internet Archive)










                           THE ELEVENTH HOUR




                            JULIA WARD HOWE

                    From a Drawing by John Elliott




                           The Eleventh Hour

                            in the Life of

                            Julia Ward Howe

                                  BY

                               MAUD HOWE

                                BOSTON

                      LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

                                 1911

                           Copyright, 1911,

                    BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

                          All rights reserved

                       Published, October, 1911

                               Printers

                  S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U. S.




                               AD MATREM


The acorns are again ripe on your oaks, the leaves of your nut tree
begin to turn gold, the fruit trees you planted a lustre since, droop
with their weight of crimson fruit, the little grey squirrels leap
nimbly from bough to bough busily preparing for winter’s siege. The
air is fragrant with the perfume of wild grape, joyous with the voices
of children passing to the white school house on the hill. The earth
laughs with the joy of the harvest. What thank offering can I bring for
this year that has not yet taught me how to live without you? Only this
sheaf of gleanings from your fields!

OAK GLEN, September, 1911.




                               FOREWORD


This slight and hasty account of some of my mother’s later activities
was written to read to a small group of friends with whom I wished
to share the lesson of the Eleventh Hour of a life filled to the end
with the joy of toil. More than one of my hearers asked me to print
what I had read them, in the belief that it would be of value to that
larger circle of her friends, the public. Such a request could not be
refused.




                           THE ELEVENTH HOUR

                            IN THE LIFE OF

                            JULIA WARD HOWE


My mother’s diary for 1906, her eighty-seventh year, opens with this
entry:

“I pray for many things this year. For myself, I ask continued
health of mind and body, work, useful, honorable and as remunerative
as it shall please God to send. For my dear family, work of the
same description with comfortable wages, faith in God, and love to
each other. For my country, that she may keep her high promise to
mankind, for Christendom, that it may become more Christlike, for the
struggling nationalities, that they may attain to justice and peace.”

Not vain the prayer! Health of mind and body was granted, work, useful,
honorable, if not very remunerative, was hers that year and nearly five
years more, for she lived to be ninety-one and a half years old. When
Death came and took her, he found her still at work. Hers the fate of
the happy warrior who falls in thick of battle, his harness on his back.

How did she do it?

Hardly a day passes that I am not asked the question!

Shortly before her death, she spoke of the time when she would no
longer be with us--an almost unheard-of thing for her to do. We turned
the subject, begged her not to dwell on it.

“Yes!” she laughed with the old flash that has kindled a thousand
audiences, “it’s not my business to think about dying, it’s my business
to think about living!”

This thinking about living, this tremendous vitality had much to do
with her long service, for the important thing of course was not
that she lived ninety-one years, but that she worked for more than
ninety-one years, never became a cumberer of the earth, paid her scot
till the last. She never knew the pathos of doing old-age work, such
as is provided in every class for those inveterate workers to whom
labor is as necessary as bread or breath. The old ploughman sits by the
wayside breaking stones to mend the road others shall travel over;
the old prima donna listens to her pupils’ triumphs; the old statesman
gives after-dinner speeches, or makes himself a nuisance by speaking or
writing, _ex cathedra_, on any question that needs airing, whether it
is his subject or not; she did good, vigorous work till the end, in her
own chosen callings of poet and orator. What she produced in her last
year was as good in quality as any other year’s output. The artist in
her never stopped growing; indeed, her latest work has a lucidity, a
robust simplicity, that some of the earlier writings lack.

In the summer of 1909 she was asked to write a poem on Fulton for the
Fulton-Hudson celebration. Ever better than her word, she not only
wrote the poem, but recited it in the New York Metropolitan Opera House
on the evening of September 9th. Those who saw her, the only woman amid
that great gathering of representative men from all over the world,
will not forget the breathless silence of that vast audience as she
came forward, leaning on her son’s arm, and read the opening lines:

    A river flashing like a gem,
    Crowned with a mountain diadem,--

or the thunders of applause that followed the last lines:

    While pledge of Love’s assured control,
    The Flag of Freedom crowns the pole.

The poem had given her a good deal of trouble, the last couplet in
especial. The morning of the celebration, when I went into Mrs. Seth
Low’s spare bedroom to wake her, she cried out:

“I have got my last verse!”

She was much distressed that the poem appeared in Collier’s without
the amended closing lines. The fault was mine; I had arranged with the
editor Mr. Hapgood for its publication. She had done so much “free
gratis” work all her life that it seemed fitting this poem should at
least earn her, her travelling expenses.

“Let this be a lesson,” she said, “never print a poem or a speech till
it has been delivered; always give the eleventh hour its chance!”

It may be interesting here to recall that the Atlantic Monthly paid her
five dollars for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the only money she
ever received for it.

Her power of keeping abreast of the times is felt in the Fulton poem,
where she rounds out her eulogy of Fulton’s invention of the steamboat
with a tribute to Peary. Only a few days before the news of our latest
arctic triumph had flashed round the world, her world, whose business
was her business as long as she lived in it; so into the fabric of the
poem in honor of Fulton, she weaves an allusion to this new victory.

On her ninety-first birthday a reporter from a Boston paper asked her
for a motto for the women of America. She was sitting on the little
balcony outside her town house, reading her Greek Testament, when the
young man was announced. She closed her book, thought for a moment,
then gave the motto that so well expressed herself:

“Up to date!”

Was there ever anything more characteristic?

In December, 1909, the last December she was to see, she wrote a poem
called “The Capitol,” for the first meeting of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters at Washington. The poem, published in the Century
Magazine for March, 1910, is as good as any she ever wrote, with one
exception--the Battle Hymn; and that, as she has told us, “wrote
itself.” She had arranged to go to Washington to read her poem before
the Association. Though we feared the winter journey for her, she was
so bent on going that I very reluctantly agreed to accompany her. A
telegram, signed by William Dean Howells, Robert Underwood Johnson, and
Thomas Nelson Page, all officers of the Association, urging her not to
take the risk of so long a journey in winter, induced her to give up
the trip. She was rather nettled by the kindly hint and flashed out:

“Hah! they think that I am too old, but there’s a little ginger left in
the old blue jar!”

She never thought of herself as old, therefore she never was really
old in the essentials. Her iron will, her indomitable spirit, held her
frail body to its duty till the very end.

“Life is like a cup of tea, the sugar is all at the bottom!” she cried
one day. This was the very truth; she knew no “winter of discontent.”
Her autumn was all Indian summer, glorious with crimson leaves, purple
and gold sunsets.

In April, 1910, she wrote the third and last of her poems to her
beloved friend and “Minister” James Freeman Clarke. She read this poem
twice, at the centenary celebration of Mr. Clarke’s birth held at the
Church of the Disciples, April 3rd, and the day after at the Arlington
St. Church. Compared with the verses written for Mr. Clarke’s fiftieth
birthday and with those celebrating his seventieth birthday, this
latest poem is to me the best. The opening lines bite right into the
heart of the matter; as she read them standing in the pulpit a thrill
passed through the congregation of her fellow disciples gathered
together in memory of their founder.

    Richer gift can no man give
    Than he doth from God receive.
    We in greatness would have pleasure,
    But we must accept our measure.
    Let us question, then, the grave,
    Querying what the Master gave,
    Whom, in his immortal state,
    Grateful love would celebrate.

    Only human life was his,
    With its thin-worn mysteries.

   *       *       *       *       *

    Lifting from the Past its veil,
   