JULIA WARD.
Once upon a time, in a great house standing at the corner of Bond Street
and Broadway, New York city, there lived a little girl. She was named
Julia, after her lovely young mother; but as she grew she showed no
resemblance to that mother, with her great dark eyes and wealth of black
ringlets. This little girl had red hair, and that was a dreadful thing
in those days. Very fine, soft hair it was, thick and wavy, but--it was
red. Visitors, coming to see her mother, would shake their heads and
say, “Poor little Julia! what a pity she has red hair!” and the tender
mother would sigh, and regret that her child should have this
misfortune, when there was no red hair in the family so far as one knew.
And the beautiful hair was combed with a leaden comb, as one old lady
said that would turn it dark; and it was soaked in honey-water, as
another old lady said that was really the best thing you could do with
it; and the little Julia felt that she might almost as well be a
hunchback or a cripple as that unfortunate creature, a red-haired child.
When she was six years old, her beautiful mother died; and after that
Julia and her brothers and sisters were brought up by their good aunt,
who came to make her home with them and their father. A very good aunt
she was, and devoted to the motherless children; but sometimes she did
funny things. They went out to ride every day--the children, I mean--in
a great yellow chariot lined with fine blue cloth. Now, it occurred to
their kind aunt that it would have a charming effect if the children
were dressed to match the chariot. So thought, so done! Dressmakers and
milliners plied their art; and one day Broadway was electrified by the
sight of the little Misses Ward, seated in uneasy state on the blue
cushions, clad in wonderful raiment of yellow and blue. They
[Illustration: JULIA WARD AND HER BROTHERS, AS CHILDREN.
(From a miniature by Miss Anne Hall.)]
had blue pelisses and yellow satin bonnets. And this was all very well
for the two younger ones, with their dark eyes and hair, and their rosy
cheeks; but Julia, young as she was, felt dimly that blue and yellow was
not the combination to set off her tawny locks and exquisite sea-shell
complexion. It is not probable, however, that she sorrowed deeply over
the funny clothes; for her mind was never set on clothes, either in
childhood or in later life. Did not her sister meet her one day coming
home from school with one blue shoe and one green? Her mind was full of
beautiful thoughts; her eyes were lifted to the green trees and the blue
sky bending above them: what did she care about shoes? Yes; and later is
it not recorded that her sisters had great difficulty in persuading her
to choose the stuff for her wedding-gown? So indifferent was she to all
matters of dress!
Auntie F. had her own ideas about shoes and stockings,--not the color,
but the quality of them. She did not believe in “pompeying” the
children; so in the coldest winter weather Julia and her sisters went
to school in thin slippers and white cotton stockings. You shiver at the
bare thought of this, my girl readers! You look at your comfortable
leggings and overshoes (that is, if you live in upper New England, or
anywhere in the same latitude), and wonder how the Ward children lived
through such a course of “hardening”! But they did live, and Julia seems
now far younger and stronger than any of her children.
School, which some children regard with mingled feelings (or so I have
been told), was a delight to Julia. She grasped at knowledge with both
hands,--plucked it as a little child plucks flowers, with unwearying
enjoyment. Her teachers, like the “people” in the case of the
“Young lady whose eyes
Were unique as to color and size,”
all turned aside, and started away in surprise, as this little
red-haired girl went on learning and learning and learning. At nine
years old she was studying Paley’s “Moral Philosophy,” with girls of
sixteen and eighteen. She could not have been older when she heard a
class reciting an Italian lesson, and fell in love with the melodious
language. She listened, and listened again; then got a grammar and
studied secretly, and one day handed to the astonished Italian teacher a
letter correctly written in Italian, begging that she might join the
class.
When I was speaking of the good aunt who was a second mother to the Ward
children, I meant to say a word of the stern but devoted father who was
the principal figure in Julia’s early life. She says of him: “He was a
majestic person, of somewhat severe aspect and reserved manners, but
with a vein of true geniality and a great benevolence of heart.” And she
adds: “His great gravity, and the absence of a mother, naturally subdued
the tone of the whole household; and though a greatly cherished set of
children, we were not a very merry one.”
Still, with all his gravity, Grandfather Ward had his gleams of fun
occasionally. It is told that Julia had a habit of dropping off her
slippers while at table. One day her father felt a wandering shell of
kid, with no foot to keep it steady. He put his own foot on it and moved
it under his chair, then said in his deep, grave voice, “My daughter,
will you bring me my seals, which I have left on the table in my room?”
And poor Julia, after a vain and frantic hunting with both feet, was
forced to go, crimson-cheeked, white-stockinged and slipperless, on the
required errand. She would never have dreamed of asking for the shoe.
She was the eldest daughter, the companion and joy of this sternly
loving father. She always sat next him at table, and sometimes he would
take her right hand in his left, and hold it for many minutes together,
continuing to eat his dinner with his right hand; while she would rather
go dinnerless than ask him to release her own fingers.
Grandfather Ward! It is a relief to confess our faults; and it may be my
duty to say that as soon as I could reach it on tiptoe, it was my joy to
pull the nose of his marble bust, which stood in the great dining-room
at Green Peace. It was a fine, smooth, long nose, most pleasant to
pull; I fear I soiled it sometimes with my little grimy fingers. I trust
children never do such naughty things nowadays.
Then there was Great-grandfather Ward, Julia’s grandfather, who had the
cradle and the great round spectacles. Doubtless he had many other
things besides, for he was a substantial New York merchant; but the
cradle and the spectacles are the only possessions of his that I have
seen. I have the cradle now, and I can testify that Great-grandfather
Ward (for I believe he was rocked in it, as his descendants for four
generations since have been) must have been an extremely long baby. It
is a fine old affair, of solid mahogany, and was evidently built to last
as long as the Wards should last. Not so very long ago, two dear people
who had been rocked together in that cradle fifty--or is it
sixty?--years ago, sat down and clasped hands over it, and wept for pure
love and tenderness and _léal souvenir_. Not less pleasant is its
present use as the good ship “Pinafore,” when six rosy, shouting
children tumble into it and rock violently, singing with might and
main,--
“We sail the ocean blue,
And our saucy ship’s a beauty!”
That is all about the cradle.
My mother writes thus of Great-grandfather Ward, her own grandfather:--
“He had been a lieutenant-colonel in the war of American
Independence. A letter from the Commander-in-Chief to Governor
Samuel Ward (of Rhode Island) mentions a visit from “your son, a
tall young man of soldierly aspect.” I cannot quote the exact
words. My grandfather had seen service in Arnold’s march through
‘the wilderness’ to Quebec. He was present at the battle of Red
Bank. After the close of the war he engaged in commercial pursuits,
and made a voyage to India as supercargo of a merchant vessel
belonging to Moses Brown, of Providence. He was in Paris at the
time of the king’s death (Louis XVI.), and for some time before
that tragic event. He speaks in his journal of having met several
of the leading revolutionists of that time at a friend’s house, and
characterizes them as ‘exceeding plain men, but very zealous.’ He
passed the day of the king’s execution, which he calls ‘one of
horror,’ in Versailles, and was grieved at the conduct of several
[Illustration: LIEUT.-COL. SAMUEL WARD.
Born Nov 17, 1756 Died Aug. 16, 1832.]
Americans, who not only remained in town, but also attended the
execution. When he finally left Paris, a proscribed nobleman,
disguised as a footman, accompanied the carriage, and so cheated
the guillotine of one expected victim.
“Colonel Ward, as my grandfather was always called, was a graduate
of Brown University, and a man of scholarly tastes. He possessed a
diamond edition of Latin classics, which always went with him in
his campaigns, and which is still preserved in the family. In
matters of art he was not so well posted. Of the pictures in the
gallery of the Luxembourg he remarks in his diary: ‘The old
pictures are considered the best. I cannot think why.’
“I remember him as very tall, stooping a little, with white hair
and mild blue eyes, which matched well his composed speech and
manners.”
I have called Great-grandfather Ward a merchant, but he was far more
than that. The son of Governor Ward of Rhode Island, he was only
eighteen when, as a gallant young captain, he marched his company to the
siege of Boston; and then (as his grandson writes me to-day) he “marched
through the wilderness of Maine, through snow and ice, barefoot, to
Quebec.” Some of my readers may possess an engraving of Trumbull’s
famous painting of the “Attack on Quebec.” Look in the left-hand corner,
and you will see a group of three,--one of them a young, active figure
with flashing eyes; that is Great-grandfather Ward. He rose to be major,
then lieutenant-colonel; was at Peekskill, Valley Forge, and Red Bank,
and wrote the official account of the last-named battle, which may be
found in Washington’s correspondence. Besides being a good man and a
brave soldier, he was a very good grandfather; and this made it all the
more naughty for his granddaughter Julia to behave as she did one day.
Being then a little child, she sat down at the piano, placed a
music-book on the rack, and began to pound and thump on the keys, making
the hideous discord which seems always to afford pleasure to the young.
Her grandfather was sitting by, book in hand; and after enduring the
noise for some time patiently, he said in his kind, courtly way, “Is it
so set down in the book, my dear?”
“Yes, Grandpapa!” said naughty Julia, and went on banging; while
grandpapa, who made no pretense of being a musician, offered no further
comment or remonstrance.
Julia grew up a student and a dreamer. She confesses to having been an
extremely absent person, and much of the time unconscious of what passed
around her. “In the large rooms of my father’s house,” she says, “I
walked up and down, perpetually alone, dreaming of extraordinary things
that I should see and do. I now began to read Shakspere and Byron, and
to try my hand at poems and plays.” She rejoices that none of the
productions of this period were published, and adds: “I regard it as a
piece of great good fortune; for a little praise or a little censure
would have been a much more disturbing element in those days than in
these.” I wish these sentiments were more general with young writers.
Still, life was not all study and dreaming. There were sometimes
merrymakings: witness the gay ball after which Julia wrote to her
brother, “I have been through the burning fiery furnace; and I am
Sad-rake, Me-sick, and Abed-no-go.” There was mischief, too, and
sometimes downright naughtiness, Who was the poor gentleman, an intimate
friend of the family, from whom Julia and her sisters extracted a
promise that he would eat nothing for three days but what they should
send him,--they in return promising three meals a day? He consented,
innocently thinking that these dear young creatures wanted to display
their skill in cookery, and expecting all kinds of delicacies and airy
dainties of pastry and confectionery. Yes! and being a man of his word,
he lived for three days on gruel, of which those “dear young creatures”
sent him a bowl at morning, noon, and night; and on nothing else!
In a certain little cabinet where many precious things are kept, I have
a manuscript poem, written by Julia Ward for the amusement of her
brothers and sisters when she was still a very young girl. It is called
“The Ill-cut Mantell; A Romaunt of the time of Kynge Arthur.” The story
is an old one, but the telling of it is all Julia’s own, and I must
quote a few lines:--
“I cannot well describe in rhyme
The female toilet of that time.
I do not know how trains were carried,
How single ladies dressed or married;
If caps were proper at a ball,
Or even if caps were worn at all;
If robes were made of crape or tulle,
If skirts were narrow, gored, or full.
Perhaps, without consulting grace,
The hair was scraped back from the face,
While on the head a mountain rose,
Crowned, like Mont Blanc, with endless snows.
It may be that the locks were shorn;
It may be that the lofty puff,
The stomacher, the rising ruff,
The bodice, or the veil were worn,
Perhaps mantillas were the passion,
Perhaps ferronières were in fashion,--
I cannot, and I will not tell.
But this one thing I wot full well,
That every lady there was dressed
In what she thought became her best.
All further notices, I grieve,
I must to your imagination leave.”
Julia sometimes tried to awaken in her sisters’ minds the poetic
aspirations which filled her own. One day she found the two little girls
playing some childish game, which seemed to her unnecessarily frivolous.
(You all know, I am sure, the eldest sister’s motto,--
“Good advice and counsel sage,
And ‘I never did so when I was your age;’”
and the companion sentiment of the younger sister,--
“‘Sister, don’t!’ and ‘Sister, do!’
And ‘Why may not I as well as you?’”)
Miss Ward,--she was always called Miss Ward, poor little dear! and her
dolls were taken away from her when she was only nine years old, that
she might better feel the dignity of her position!--Miss Ward rebuked
the little sisters, and bade them lay aside their foolish toys and
improve their minds by composing poetry. Louisa shook her black curls,
and would not,--moreover, did not, being herself a child of some
firmness. But little sweet Annie would try, to please Sister Julia; and
after much thought and labor she produced the following pious
effusion:--
“He feeds the ravens when they call,
And stands them in a pleasant hall.”
I never can recall these lines without having an instant vision of a
pillared hall, fair and
[Illustration: JULIA WARD.]
stately, with ravens standing in niches along the sides, between the
marble columns!
So this maiden, Julia, grew up to womanhood, dreamy and absent, absorbed
in severe study and composition, yet always ready with the brilliant
flashes of her wit, which broke like sunbeams through the mist of
dreams. She was very fair to look upon. No one now pitied her for the
glorious crown of red-gold hair, which set off the rose and ivory of her
matchless complexion; every one recognized and acknowledged in her
“stately Julia, queen of all.”
Once, while on a visit to Boston, Julia heard the wonderful story of
Laura Bridgman, who had just been led out of darkness into the light of
life and joy by a certain Dr. Howe, a man of whom people spoke as a
modern paladin of romance, a Roland or Bayard. She saw him, and felt at
once that he was the most remarkable man she had ever known. He, on his
part, saw a youthful prophetess, radiant and inspired, crowned with
golden hair. Acquaintance ripened into friendship, friendship into love;
and so it happened that, in the year 1843, Samuel G. Howe and Julia
Ward were married. The next chapter shall tell you of Julia Ward Howe,
as we, her children, have known her.