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AN AMERICAN WOMAN.
The desire of knowledge is a powerful instinct of the soul, as
inherent in woman as in man.... It was designed to be gratified, all
the avenues of her soul are open for its gratification. Her every
sense is as perfect as man’s: her hand is as delicate in its touch,
her ear as acute in hearing, her eye the same in its wonderful
mechanism, her brain sends out the same two-fold telegraphic
network. She is endowed with the same consciousness, the same power
of perception. Every attribute of his soul is hers also. From her
very organization she is manifestly formed for the pursuit of the
same knowledge, for the attainment of the same virtue, for the
unfolding of the same truth. Whatever aids man in the pursuit of any
one of these objects must aid her also. Let woman then reject the
philosophy of a narrow prejudice or of false custom, and trust
implicitly to God’s glorious handwriting on every folded tissue of
her body, on every tablet of her soul. Let her seek for the highest
culture of brain and heart. Let her apply her talent to the highest
use. In so doing will the harmony of her being be perfect. Brain and
heart according well will make one music. All the bright
intellections of the mind, all the beautiful affections of the heart
will together form one perfect crystal around the pole of Truth.
From these words of hers it appears that Angeline Hall believed in a
well-rounded life for women as well as for men; and to the best of her
ability she lived up to her creed. Physically deficient herself, she
heralded the advent of the American woman—the peer of Spartan mother,
Roman matron or modern European dame. Her ideal could hardly be called
“the new woman,” for she fulfilled the duties of wife and mother with
the utmost devotion. Among college women she was a pioneer; and perhaps
the best type of college woman corresponds to her ideal.
[Illustration: PHOTOGRAPH OF 1878]
In person she was not remarkable—height about five feet three inches,
weight with clothing about one hundred and twenty-three pounds. In
middle life she was considerably bent over, more from years of toil than
from physical weakness. Nervous strength was lacking; and early in life
she lost her teeth. But her frame was well developed, her waist being as
large as a Greek goddess’s, for she scorned the use of corsets. Her
smooth skin was of fine stout texture. Her well-shaped head was adorned
by thin curls of wonderfully fine, dark hair, which even at the time of
death showed hardly a trace of white. Straight mouth, high forehead,
strong brow, large straight nose, and beautiful brown eyes indicated a
woman of great spiritual force.
She cared little for adornment, believing that the person is attractive
if the soul is good. Timid in the face of physical danger, she was
endowed with great moral courage and invincible resolution. She used to
speak of “going along and doing something,” and of “doing a little every
day.” Friends and relatives found in her a wise counsellor and fearless
leader. She was gifted with intellect of a high order—an unquenchable
thirst for knowledge, a good memory, excellent mathematical ability, and
the capacity for mental labor. But her sense of duty controlled, and she
devoted her talents to the service of others.
Unlike Lady Macbeth in other respects, she was suited to bear
men-children. And, thanks to her true womanhood, she nursed them at the
breast. There were no bottle babies in the Hall family. Tradition has it
that she endured the pains of childbirth with unusual fortitude, hardly
needing a physician. But this seeming strength was due in part to an
unwise modesty.
With hardly enough strength for the duties of each day, she did work
enough for two women through sheer force of will. It is not surprising
then that she died, in the sixty-second year of her age, from a stroke
of apoplexy. She was by no means apoplectic in appearance, being rather
a pale person; but the blood-vessels of the brain were worn out and
could no longer withstand the pressure. In the fall of 1881, after the
death of her sister Mary and of Nellie Woodward, daughter of her sister
Ruth, she was the victim of a serious sickness, which continued for six
months or more. Friends thought she would die; but her sister Ruth came
and took care of her, and saved her for ten more years of usefulness.
She lived to see her youngest son through college, attended his Class
Day, and died a few days after his graduation.
The motive power of her life was religious faith—a faith that outgrew
all forms of superstition. Brought up to accept the narrow theology of
her mother’s church, she became a Unitarian. The eldest son was sent
regularly to the Unitarian Sunday School in Washington; but a quarrel
arising in the church, she quietly withdrew, and thereafter assumed the
whole responsibility of training her sons in Christian morals.
Subsequently she took a keen interest in the Concord School of
Philosophy; and, adopting her husband’s view, she looked to science for
the regeneration of mankind. In this she was not altogether wise, for
her own experience had proven that the advancement of knowledge depends
upon a divine enthusiasm, which must be fed by a religion of some sort.
Fortunately, she was possessed of a poetic soul, and she never lost
religious feeling.
The following poem illustrates very well the faith of her later life:
TO SCIENCE.
I.
Friend of our race, O Science, strong and wise!
Though thou wast scorned and wronged and sorely tried,
Bound and imprisoned, racked and crucified,
Thou dost in life invulnerable rise
The glorious leader ’gainst our enemies.
Thou art Truth’s champion for the domain wide
Ye twain shall conquer fighting side by side.
Knowledge and Freedom are thy great allies.
Thus thou art strong, and able thou to cope
With all thy enemies that yet remain.
They fly already from the open plain,
And climb, hard-pressed, far up the rugged slope.
We hear thy bugle sound o’er land and sea
And know that victory abides with thee.
II.
Because thou’st conquered all _one_ little world
Thou never like the ancient king dost weep,
But like the brave Ulysses, on the deep
Dost launch thy bark, and, all its sails unfurled,
Dost search for new worlds which may lie impearled
By happy islands where the billows sleep;
Or into sunless seas dost fearless sweep,
Braving the tempest which is round thee hurled;
Or, bolder still, mounting where far stars shine,
From conquest unto conquest thou dost rise
And hold’st dominion over realms divine,
Where, clear defined unto thy piercing eyes,
And fairer than Faith’s yearnful heart did ween
Stretches the vastness of the great Unseen.
III.
E’en where thy sight doth fail thou givest not o’er,
But still “beyond the red” thy spectraphone
The ray invisible transforms to tone,
Thus winning from the silence more and more;
Wherein thou buildest new worlds from shore to shore
With hills perpetual and with mountains lone;
To music moving pond’rous stone on stone
As unto Orpheus’ lyre they moved of yore.
Still, Science, lightning-winged! thy way pursue!
Beyond the farthest sweep of farthest sun,
Beyond the music of the sounding spheres
Which chant the measures of the months and years,
Toward realms that e’en to daring Thought are new
Still let thy flying feet unwearied run.
IV.
O, friend of Faith! let her not deem thee foe,
Though thou dost drive her from the Paradise
To which she clings with backward turning eyes,
Thou art her angel still, and biddest her go
To wider lands where the great rivers flow,
And broad and green many a valley lies,
Where high and grand th’ eternal mountains rise,
And oceans fathomless surge to and fro.
Thus thou dost teach her that God’s true and real,
Fairer and grander than her dreams _must_ be;
Till she shall leave the realm of the Ideal
To follow Truth throughout the world with thee,
Through earth and sea and up beyond the sun
Until the mystery of God is won.
Whatever the literary defects, these are noble sonnets. But I had rather
take my chances in a good Unitarian church than try to nourish the soul
with such Platonic love of God. She disliked the Unitarian habit of
clinging to church traditions and ancient forms of worship; but better
these than the materialism of a scientific age.
Perhaps I do her an injustice. She was absolutely loyal to truth, not
guilty of that shuffling attitude of modern theologians who have
outgrown the superstition of Old Testament only to cling more
tenaciously to the superstition of the New. In the Concord School of
Philosophy, and later in her studies as a member of the Ladies’
Historical Society of Washington, she was searching for the new faith
that should fulfil the old. It might be of interest here to introduce
selections from some of her Historical Society essays, into the
composition of which she entered with great earnestness. Written toward
the close of life, they still retain the freshness and unspoiled
enthusiasm of youth. One specimen must suffice:
In thinking of Galileo, and the office of the telescope, which is to
give us increase of light, and of the increasing power of the larger
and larger lenses, which widens our horizon to infinity, this
constantly recurring thought comes to me: how shall we grow into the
immensity that is opening before us? The principle of light pervades
all space—it travels from star to star and makes known to us all
objects on earth and in heaven. The great ether throbs and thrills
with its burden to the remotest star as with a joy. But there is
also an all-pervading force, so subtle that we know not yet how it
passes through the illimitable space. But before it all worlds fall
into divine order and harmony. It is gravitation. It imparts the
power of one to all, and gathers from all for the one. What in the
soul answers to these two principles is, first, also light or
knowledge, by which all things are unveiled; the other which answers
to gravitation, and before which all shall come into proper
relations, and into the heavenly harmony, and by which we shall fill
the heavens with ourselves, and ourselves with heaven, is love.
This is better than most philosophy. But after all, Angeline Hall gave
herself to duty and not to philosophy—to the plain, monotonous work of
home and neighborhood. Like the virtuous woman of Scripture, she
supplied with her own hands the various family wants—cooked with great
skill, canned abundance of fruit for winter, and supplied the table from
day to day with plain, wholesome food. Would that she might have taught
Bostonians to bake beans! If they would try her method, they would
discover that a mutton bone is an excellent substitute for pork. Pork
and lard she banished from her kitchen. Beef suet is, indeed, much
cleaner. The chief article of diet was meat, for Mrs. Hall was no
vegetarian, and the Georgetown markets supplied the best of Virginia
beef and mutton. Like the virtuous woman of Scripture, she provided the
family with warm clothing, and kept it in repair. A large part of her
life was literally spent in mending clothes. She never relaxed the rigid
economy of Cambridge days. She commonly needed but one servant, for she
worked with her own hands and taught her sons to help her. The house was
always substantially clean from roof to cellar. No corner was neglected.
Nowhere on the whole premises was a bad smell tolerated.
While family wants were scrupulously attended to, she stretched forth a
hand to the poor. The Civil War filled Washington with negroes, and for
several winters Mrs. Hall helped to distribute supplies among them. In
1872 she was “Directress” of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth wards; and
for a long time she was a member of a benevolent society in Georgetown,
having charge of a section of the city near her residence. For the last
fourteen years of her life, she visited the Home for Destitute Colored
Women and Children in north Washington. Her poor colored neighbors
regarded her with much esteem. She listened to their stories of
distress, comforted them, advised them. The aged she admitted to her
warm kitchen; and they went away, victuals in their baskets or coins in
their hands, with the sense of having a friend in Mrs. Hall. Uncle
Louis, said to be one hundred and fourteen years old, rewarded her with
a grape-vine, which was planted by the dining room window. And “the
Uncle Louis grape” was the best in the garden.
At the close of the Civil War she even undertook to redeem two fallen
Irish women by taking them into her house to work. But their appetite
for whiskey was too strong, and they would steal butter, barter it for
liquor, and come home drunk. On one occasion one of these women took
little Asaph along to visit the saloon; and there his mother found him,
with the servant standing by joking with rough men, her dress in shreds.
Mrs. Hall had no time or strength for such charitable enterprises, and
soon abandoned them. She was saved from most of the follies of
philanthropy by the good sense of her husband, whom she rewarded with
the devotion of a faithful wife. His studies and researches, almost from
the first, were much too deep for her entire comprehension, but she was
always enthusiastic about his work. In the introduction to his
“_Observations and Orbits of the Satellites of Mars_,” Professor Hall
chivalrously says:
In the spring of 1877, the approaching favorable opposition of the
planet Mars attracted my attention, and the idea occurred to me of
making a careful search with our large Clark refractor for a
satellite of this planet. An examination of the literature of the
planet showed, however, such a mass of observations of various
kinds, made by the most experienced and skillful astronomers that
the chance of finding a satellite appeared to be very slight, so
that I might have abandoned the search had it not been for the
encouragement of my wife.
In fact, Mrs. Hall was full of enthusiasm. Each night she sent her
husband to the observatory supplied with a nourishing lunch, and each
night she awaited developments with eager interest. I can well remember
the excitement at home. There was a great secret in the house, and all
the members of the family were drawn more closely together by mutual
confidence.
The moral and intellectual training of her sons has already been
referred to. Summer vacations were often spent with her sisters in
Rodman, N.Y. Her mother, who reached the age of eighty years, died in
the summer of 1878, when Mrs. Hall became the head of the Stickney
family. Her sisters Mary and Elmina were childless. Ruth had six
children, in whose welfare their Aunt Angeline took a lively interest.
The three girls each spent a winter with her in Washington, and when, in
the summer of 1881, Nellie was seized with a fatal illness, Aunt
Angeline was present to care for her. Now and then Charlotte Ingalls,
who had prospered in Wisconsin, would come on from the West, and the
Stickney sisters would all be together. The last reunion occurred in the
summer of 1891, a year previous to Angeline’s death. It was a goodly
sight to see the sisters in one wagon, near the old home place; and
when, at Elmina’s house, Angeline was bustling about attending to the
needs of the united family, it was good to hear Charlotte exclaim, “Take
care, old lady!” She was thirteen years older than Angeline, and seemed
almost to belong to an earlier generation. She remembered her father
well, and had no doubt acquired from him some of the ancient New
Hampshire customs lost to her younger sisters. Certainly her
exclamations of “Fiddlesticks,” and “Witch-cats,” were quaint and
picturesque.
But it was Angeline who was really best versed in the family history.
She had made a study of it, in all its branches, and could trace her
descent from at least eleven worthy Englishmen, most of whom arrived in
New England before 1650. She made excursions to various points in New
England in search of relatives. At Belchertown, Mass., in 1884, she
found her grandfather Cook’s first cousin, Mr. Thomas Sabin. He was then
one hundred years old, and remembered how in boyhood he used to go
skating with Elisha Cook.
How brief the history of America in the presence of such a man! I
remember seeing an old New Englander, as late as 1900, who as a boy of
eleven years had seen General Lafayette. It was a treat to hear him
describe the courteous Frenchman, slight of stature, bent with age, but
active and polite enough to alight from the stage-coach to shake hands
with the people assembled to welcome him in the little village of
Charlton, Mass.
Mrs. Hall had no time for travel. At the close of life she longed to
visit Europe, but death intervened, and her days were spent in her
native country. She passed two summers in the mountains of Virginia. In
1878, with her little son Percival, she accompanied her husband to
Colorado, to observe the total eclipse of the sun. Three years before
they had taken the whole family to visit her sister Charlotte’s people
in Wisconsin.
It was through her family loyalty that she acquired the Adirondack
habit. In the summer of 1882, after the severe sickness of the preceding
winter, she was staying with a cousin’s son, a country doctor, in
Washington County, N.Y. He proposed an outing in the invigorating air of
the Adirondacks. And so, with her three youngest sons and the doctor’s
family, she drove to Indian Lake, and camped there about a week. Her
improvement was so marked that the next summer, accompanied by three
sons and her sister Ruth, she drove into the wilderness from the West,
camping a few days in a log cabin by the side of Piseco Lake. In 1885,
setting out from Rodman again, she drove four hundred miles, passing
north of the mountains to Paul Smith’s, and thence to Saranac Lake
village, John Brown’s farm, Keene Valley, and Lake George, and returning
by way of the Mohawk Valley. In 1888 she camped with the three youngest
sons on Lower Saranac, and in 1890 she spent July and August at the
summer school of Thomas Davidson, on the side of Mt. Hurricane. One day
I escorted her and her friend Miss Sarah Waitt to the top of the
mountain, four or five miles distant, and we spent the night on the
summit before a blazing camp-fire. Two years later she was planning
another Adirondack trip when death overtook her—at the house of her
friend Mrs. Berrien, at North Andover, Mass., July 3, 1892.
Her poem “Heracles,” written towards the close of her career, fittingly
describes her own herculean labors:
HERACLES.
I.
Genius of labor, mighty Heracles!
Though bound by fate to do another’s will,
Not basely, as a slave, dost thou fulfil
The appointed task. The eye of God to please
Thou seekest, and man to bless, and not thy ease.
So to thy wearying toil thou addest still
New labors, to redeem some soul from ill,
Performing all thy generous mind conceives.
From the sea-monster’s jaws thy arm did free,
And from her chains, the fair Hesione.
And when Alcestis, who her lord to save,
Her life instead a sacrifice she gave,
Then wast thou near with heart that never quailed,
And o’er Death’s fearful form thy might prevailed.
II.
Because thou chosest virtue, when for thee
Vice her alluring charms around thee spread,
The gods, approving, smiled from overhead,
And gave to thee thy shining panoply.
Then wentest thou forth to certain victory.
Nature obedient to thy will was led,
Out rushed the rivers from their ancient bed
And washed the filth of earth into the sea.
When ’gainst thy foes thy arrows all were spent,
Zeus stones instead, in whirling snow-cloud sent.
When with sore heat oppressed, O wearied one!
Thou thought’st to aim thy arrows at the sun,
Then Helios sent his golden boat to thee
To bear thee safely through the trackless sea.
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