Few in the days of early youth
Trusted like me in love and truth.
I've learned sad lessons from the years,
But slowly, and with many tears;
For God made me to kindly view
The world that I am passing through.
Though kindness and forbearance long
Must meet ingratitude and wrong,
I still would bless my fellow-men,
And trust them though deceived again.
God help me still to kindly view
The world that I am passing through.
From all that fate has brought to me
I strive to learn humility,
And trust in Him who rules above,
Whose universal law is love.
Thus only can I kindly view
The world that I am passing through.
When I approach the setting sun,
And feel my journey well-nigh done,
May Earth be veiled in genial light,
And her last smile to me seem bright.
Help me till then to kindly view
The world that I am passing through.
And all who tempt a trusting heart
From faith and hope to drift apart,
May they themselves be spared the pain
Of losing power to trust again.
God help us all to kindly view
The world that we are passing through.
While faithful to the great duty which she felt was laid upon her in an
especial manner, she was by no means a reformer of one idea, but her
interest was manifested in every question affecting the welfare of
humanity. Peace, temperance, education, prison reform, and equality of
civil rights, irrespective of sex, engaged her attention. Under all the
disadvantages of her estrangement from popular favor, her charming Greek
romance of _Philothea_ and her _Lives of Madame Roland_ and the _Baroness
de Stael_ proved that her literary ability had lost nothing of its
strength, and that the hand which penned such terrible rebukes had still
kept its delicate touch, and gracefully yielded to the inspiration of
fancy and art. While engaged with her husband in the editorial
supervision of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, she wrote her admirable
_Letters from New York_; humorous, eloquent, and picturesque, but still
humanitarian in tone, which extorted the praise of even a pro-slavery
community. Her great work, in three octavo volumes, _The Progress of
Religious Ideas_, belongs, in part, to that period. It is an attempt to
represent in a candid, unprejudiced manner the rise and progress of the
great religions of the world, and their ethical relations to each other.
She availed herself of, and carefully studied, the authorities at that
time accessible, and the result is creditable to her scholarship,
industry, and conscientiousness. If, in her desire to do justice to the
religions of Buddha and Mohammed, in which she has been followed by
Maurice, Max Muller, and Dean Stanley, she seems at times to dwell upon
the best and overlook the darker features of those systems, her
concluding reflections should vindicate her from the charge of
undervaluing the Christian faith, or of lack of reverent appreciation of
its founder. In the closing chapter of her work, in which the large
charity and broad sympathies of her nature are manifest, she thus turns
with words of love, warm from the heart, to Him whose Sermon on the Mount
includes most that is good and true and vital in the religions and
philosophies of the world:--
"It was reserved for Him to heal the brokenhearted, to preach a gospel to
the poor, to say, 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved
much.' Nearly two thousand years have passed away since these words of
love and pity were uttered, yet when I read them my eyes fill with tears.
I thank Thee, O Heavenly Father, for all the messengers thou hast sent to
man; but, above all, I thank Thee for Him, thy beloved Son! Pure lily
blossom of the centuries, taking root in the lowliest depths, and
receiving the light and warmth of heaven in its golden heart! All that
the pious have felt, all that poets have said, all that artists have
done, with their manifold forms of beauty, to represent the ministry of
Jesus, are but feeble expressions of the great debt we owe Him who is
even now curing the lame, restoring sight to the blind, and raising the
dead in that spiritual sense wherein all miracle is true."
During her stay in New York, as editor of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_,
she found a pleasant home at the residence of the genial philanthropist,
Isaac T. Hopper, whose remarkable life she afterwards wrote. Her
portrayal of this extraordinary man, so brave, so humorous, so tender and
faithful to his convictions of duty, is one of the most readable pieces
of biography in English literature. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in a
discriminating paper published in 1869, speaks of her eight years'
sojourn in New York as the most interesting and satisfactory period of
her whole life. "She was placed where her sympathetic nature found
abundant outlet and occupation. Dwelling in a house where
disinterestedness and noble labor were as daily breath, she had great
opportunities. There was no mere alms-giving; but sin and sorrow must
be brought home to the fireside and the heart; the fugitive slave, the
drunkard, the outcast woman, must be the chosen guests of the abode,--
must be taken, and held, and loved into reformation or hope."
It would be a very imperfect representation of Maria Child which regarded
her only from a literary point of view. She was wise in counsel; and men
like Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrew
availed themselves of her foresight and sound judgment of men and
measures. Her pen was busy with correspondence, and whenever a true man
or a good cause needed encouragement, she was prompt to give it. Her
donations for benevolent causes and beneficent reforms were constant and
liberal; and only those who knew her intimately could understand the
cheerful and unintermitted self-denial which alone enabled her to make
them. She did her work as far as possible out of sight, without noise or
pretension. Her time, talents, and money were held not as her own, but a
trust from the Eternal Father for the benefit of His suffering children.
Her plain, cheap dress was glorified by the generous motive for which she
wore it. Whether in the crowded city among the sin-sick and starving, or
among the poor and afflicted in the neighborhood of her country home, no
story of suffering and need, capable of alleviation, ever reached her
without immediate sympathy and corresponding action. Lowell, one of her
warmest admirers, in his _Fable for Critics_ has beautifully portrayed
her abounding benevolence:--
"There comes Philothea, her face all aglow:
She has just been dividing some poor creature's woe,
And can't tell which pleases her most, to relieve
His want, or his story to hear and believe.
No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails,
For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales;
She knows well that silence is sorrow's best food,
And that talking draws off from the heart its black blood."
"The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls,
But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles,
And folks with a mission that nobody knows
Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose.
She can fill up the carets in such, make their scope
Converge to some focus of rational hope,
And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall
Can transmute into honey,--but this is not all;
Not only for those she has solace; O, say,
Vice's desperate nursling adrift in Broadway,
Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human,
To the last slender spar from the wreck of the woman,
Hast thou not found one shore where those tired, drooping feet
Could reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beat
The soothed head in silence reposing could hear
The chimes of far childhood throb back on the ear?"
"Ah, there's many a beam from the fountain of day
That, to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way,
Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide ope
To the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope;
Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dares to go in
To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin,
And to bring into each, or to find there, some line
Of the never completely out-trampled divine;
If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,
'T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs again,
As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain
Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain;
What a wealth would it bring to the narrow and sour,
Could they be as a Child but for one little hour!"
After leaving New York, her husband and herself took up their residence
in the rural town of Wayland, Mass. Their house, plain and
unpretentious, had a wide and pleasant outlook; a flower garden,
carefully tended by her own hands, in front, and on the side a fruit
orchard and vegetable garden, under the special care of her husband. The
house was always neat, with some appearance of unostentatious decoration,
evincing at once the artistic taste of the hostess and the conscientious
economy which forbade its indulgence to any great extent. Her home was
somewhat apart from the lines of rapid travel, and her hospitality was in
a great measure confined to old and intimate friends, while her visits to
the city were brief and infrequent. A friend of hers, who had ample
opportunities for a full knowledge of her home-life, says, "The domestic
happiness of Mr. and Mrs. Child seemed to me perfect. Their sympathies,
their admiration of all things good, and their hearty hatred of all
things mean and evil were in entire unison. Mr. Child shared his wife's
enthusiasms, and was very proud of her. Their affection, never paraded,
was always manifest. After Mr. Child's death, Mrs. Child, in speaking of
the future life, said, 'I believe it would be of small value to me if I
were not united to him.'"
In this connection I cannot forbear to give an extract from some
reminiscences of her husband, which she left among her papers, which,
better than any words of mine, will convey an idea of their simple and
beautiful home-life:--
"In 1852 we made a humble home in Wayland, Mass., where we spent twenty-
two pleasant years entirely alone, without any domestic, mutually serving
each other, and dependent upon each other for intellectual companionship.
I always depended on his richly stored mind, which was able and ready to
furnish needed information on any subject. He was my walking dictionary
of many languages, my Universal Encyclopaedia.
"In his old age he was as affectionate and devoted as when the lover of
my youth; nay, he manifested even more tenderness. He was often
singing,--
"'There's nothing half so sweet in life
As Love's old dream.'
"Very often, when he passed by me, he would lay his hand softly on my
head and murmur, 'Carum caput.' . . . But what I remember with the
most tender gratitude is his uniform patience and forbearance with my
faults. . . . He never would see anything but the bright side of my
character. He always insisted upon thinking that whatever I said was the
wisest and the wittiest, and that whatever I did was the best. The
simplest little jeu d'esprit of mine seemed to him wonderfully witty.
Once, when he said, 'I wish for your sake, dear, I were as rich as
Croesus,' I answered, 'You are Croesus, for you are king of Lydia.' How
often he used to quote that!
"His mind was unclouded to the last. He had a passion for philology, and
only eight hours before he passed away he was searching out the
derivation of a word."
Her well-stored mind and fine conversational gifts made her company
always desirable. No one who listened to her can forget the earnest
eloquence with which she used to dwell upon the evidences, from history,
tradition, and experience, of the superhuman and supernatural; or with
what eager interest she detected in the mysteries of the old religions of
the world the germs of a purer faith and a holier hope. She loved to
listen, as in St. Pierre's symposium of _The Coffee-House of Surat_,
to the confessions of faith of all sects and schools of philosophy,
Christian and pagan, and gather from them the consoling truth that our
Father has nowhere left his children without some witness of Himself.
She loved the old mystics, and lingered with curious interest and
sympathy over the writings of Bohme, Swedenborg, Molinos, and Woolman.
Yet this marked speculative tendency seemed not in the slightest degree
to affect her practical activities. Her mysticism and realism ran in
close parallel lines without interfering with each other.
With strong rationalistic tendencies from education and conviction, she
found herself in spiritual accord with the pious introversion of Thomas
a Kempis and Madame Guion. She was fond of Christmas Eve stories, of
warnings, signs, and spiritual intimations, her half belief in which
sometimes seemed like credulity to her auditors. James Russell Lowell,
in his tender tribute to her, playfully alludes to this characteristic:--
"She has such a musical taste that she 'll go
Any distance to hear one who draws a long bow.
She will swallow a wonder by mere might and main."
In 1859 the descent of John Brown upon Harper's Ferry, and his capture,
trial, and death, startled the nation. When the news reached her that
the misguided but noble old man lay desperately wounded in prison, alone
and unfriended, she wrote him a letter, under cover of one to Governor
Wise, asking permission to go and nurse and care for him. The expected
arrival of Captain Brown's wife made her generous offer unnecessary. The
prisoner wrote her, thanking her, and asking her to help his family, a
request with which she faithfully complied. With his letter came one
from Governor Wise, in courteous reproval of her sympathy for John Brown.
To this she responded in an able and effective manner. Her reply found
its way from Virginia to the New York Tribune, and soon after Mrs. Mason,
of King George's County, wife of Senator Mason, the author of the
infamous Fugitive Slave Law, wrote her a vehement letter, commencing with
threats of future damnation, and ending with assuring her that "no
Southerner, after reading her letter to Governor Wise, ought to read a
line of her composition, or touch a magazine which bore her name in its
list of contributors." To this she wrote a calm, dignified reply,
declining to dwell on the fierce invectives of her assailant, and wishing
her well here and hereafter. She would not debate the specific merits or
demerits of a man whose body was in charge of the courts, and whose
reputation was sure to be in charge of posterity. "Men," she continues,
"are of small consequence in comparison with principles, and the
principle for which John Brown died is the question at issue between us."
These letters were soon published in pamphlet form, and had the immense
circulation of 300,000 copies.
In 1867 she published _A Romance of the Republic_, a story of the days of
slavery; powerful in its delineation of some of the saddest as well as
the most dramatic conditions of master and slave in the Southern States.
Her husband, who had been long an invalid, died in 1874. After his death
her home, in winter especially, became a lonely one, and in 1877 she
began to spend the cold months in Boston.
Her last publication was in 1878, when her _Aspirations of the World_, a
book of selections, on moral and religious subjects, from the literature
of all nations and times, was given to the public. The introduction,
occupying fifty pages, shows, at threescore and ten, her mental vigor
unabated, and is remarkable for its wise, philosophic tone and felicity
of diction. It has the broad liberality of her more elaborate work on
the same subject, and in the mellow light of life's sunset her words seem
touched with a tender pathos and beauty. "All we poor mortals," she
says, "are groping our way through paths that are dim with shadows; and
we are all striving, with steps more or less stumbling, to follow some
guiding star. As we travel on, beloved companions of our pilgrimage
vanish from our sight, we know not whither; and our bereaved hearts utter
cries of supplication for more light. We know not where Hermes
Trismegistus lived, or who he was; but his voice sounds plaintively
human, coming up from the depths of the ages, calling out, 'Thou art God!
and thy man crieth these things unto Thee!' Thus closely allied in our
sorrows and limitations, in our aspirations and hopes, surely we ought
not to be separated in our sympathies. However various the names by
which we call the Heavenly Father, if they are set to music by brotherly
love, they can all be sung together."
Her interest in the welfare of the emancipated class at the South and of
the ill-fated Indians of the West remained unabated, and she watched with
great satisfaction the experiment of the education of both classes in
General Armstrong's institution at Hampton, Va. She omitted no
opportunity of aiding the greatest social reform of the age, which aims
to make the civil and political rights of women equal to those of men.
Her sympathies, to the last, went out instinctively to the wronged and
weak. She used to excuse her vehemence in this respect by laughingly
quoting lines from a poem entitled _The Under Dog in the Fight_:--
"I know that the world, the great big world,
Will never a moment stop
To see which dog may be in the wrong,
But will shout for the dog on top.
"But for me, I never shall pause to ask
Which dog may be in the right;
For my heart will beat, while it beats at all,
For the under dog in the fight."
I am indebted to a gentleman who was at one time a resident of Wayland,
and who enjoyed her confidence and warm friendship, for the following
impressions of her life in that place:--
"On one of the last beautiful Indian summer afternoons, closing the past
year, I drove through Wayland, and was anew impressed with the charm of
our friend's simple existence there. The tender beauty of the fading
year seemed a reflection of her own gracious spirit; the lovely autumn of
her life, whose golden atmosphere the frosts of sorrow and advancing age
had only clarified and brightened.
"My earliest recollection of Mrs. Child in Wayland is of a gentle face
leaning from the old stage window, smiling kindly down on the childish
figures beneath her; and from that moment her gracious motherly presence
has been closely associated with the charm of rural beauty in that
village, which until very lately has been quite apart from the line of
travel, and unspoiled by the rush and worry of our modern steam-car mode
of living.
"Mrs. Child's life in the place made, indeed, an atmosphere of its own, a
benison of peace and good-will, which was a noticeable feature to all who
were acquainted with the social feeling of the little community, refined,
as it was too, by the elevating influence of its distinguished pastor,
Dr. Sears. Many are the acts of loving kindness and maternal care which
could be chronicled of her residence there, were we permitted to do so;
and numberless are the lives that have gathered their onward impulse from
her helping hand. But it was all a confidence which she hardly betrayed
to her inmost self, and I will not recall instances which might be her
grandest eulogy. Her monument is builded in the hearts which knew her
benefactions, and it will abide with 'the power that makes for
righteousness.'
"One of the pleasantest elements of her life in Wayland was the high
regard she won from the people of the village, who, proud of her literary
attainment, valued yet more the noble womanhood of the friend who dwelt
so modestly among them. The grandeur of her exalted personal character
had, in part, eclipsed for them the qualities which made her fame with
the world outside.
"The little house on the quiet by-road overlooked broad green meadows.
The pond behind it, where bloom the lilies whose spotless purity may well
symbolize her gentle spirit, is a sacred pool to her townsfolk. But
perhaps the most fitting similitude of her life in Wayland was the quiet
flow of the river, whose gentle curves make green her meadows, but whose
powerful energy, joining the floods from distant mountains, moves, with
resistless might, the busy shuttles of a hundred mills. She was too
truthful to affect to welcome unwarrantable invaders of her peace, but no
weary traveller on life's hard ways ever applied to her in vain. The
little garden plot before her door was a sacred enclosure, not to be
rudely intruded upon; but the flowers she tended with maternal care were
no selfish possession, for her own enjoyment only, and many are the lives
their sweetness has gladdened forever. So she lived among a singularly
peaceful and intelligent community as one of themselves, industrious,
wise, and happy; with a frugality whose motive of wider benevolence was
in itself a homily and a benediction."
In my last interview with her, our conversation, as had often happened
before, turned upon the great theme of the future life. She spoke, as I
remember, calmly and not uncheerfully, but with the intense earnestness
and reverent curiosity of one who felt already the shadow of the unseen
world resting upon her.
Her death was sudden and quite unexpected. For some months she had been
troubled with a rheumatic affection, but it was by no means regarded as
serious. A friend, who visited her a few days before her departure,
found her in a comfortable condition, apart from lameness. She talked of
the coming election with much interest, and of her plans for the winter.
On the morning of her death (October 20, 1880) she spoke of feeling
remarkably well. Before leaving her chamber she complained of severe
pain in the region of the heart. Help was called by her companion, but
only reached her to witness her quiet passing away.
The funeral was, as befitted one like her, plain and simple. Many of her
old friends were present, and Wendell Phillips paid an affecting and
eloquent tribute to his old friend and anti-slavery coadjutor. He
referred to the time when she accepted, with serene self-sacrifice, the
obloquy which her _Appeal_ had brought upon her, and noted, as one of the
many ways in which popular hatred was manifested, the withdrawal from her
of the privileges of the Boston Athenaeum. Her pallbearers were elderly,
plain farmers in the neighborhood; and, led by the old white-haired
undertaker, the procession wound its way to the not distant burial-
ground, over the red and gold of fallen leaves, and tinder the half-
clouded October sky. A lover of all beautiful things, she was, as her
intimate friends knew, always delighted by the sight of rainbows, and
used to so arrange prismatic glasses as to throw the colors on the walls
of her room. Just after her body was consigned to the earth, a
magnificent rainbow spanned with its are of glory the eastern sky.
The incident at her burial is alluded to in a sonnet written by
William P. Andrews:--
"Freedom! she knew thy summons, and obeyed
That clarion voice as yet scarce heard of men;
Gladly she joined thy red-cross service when
Honor and wealth must at thy feet be laid
Onward with faith undaunted, undismayed
By threat or scorn, she toiled with hand and brain
To make thy cause triumphant, till the chain
Lay broken, and for her the freedmen prayed.
Nor yet she faltered; in her tender care
She took us all; and wheresoe'er she went,
Blessings, and Faith, and Beauty followed there,
E'en to the end, where she lay down content;
And with the gold light of a life more fair,
Twin bows of promise o'er her grave were blest."
The letters in this collection constitute but a small part of her large
correspondence. They have been gathered up and arranged by the hands of
dear relatives and friends as a fitting memorial of one who wrote from
the heart as well as the head, and who held her literary reputation
subordinate always to her philanthropic aim to lessen the sum of human
suffering, and to make the world better for her living. If they
sometimes show the heat and impatience of a zealous reformer, they may
well be pardoned in consideration of the circumstances under which they
were written, and of the natural indignation of a generous nature in view
of wrong and oppression. If she touched with no very reverent hand the
garment hem of dogmas, and held to the spirit of Scripture rather than
its letter, it must be remembered that she lived in a time when the Bible
was cited in defence of slavery, as it is now in Utah in support of
polygamy; and she may well be excused for some degree of impatience with
those who, in the tithing of mint and anise and cummin, neglected the
weightier matters of the law of justice and mercy.
Of the men and women directly associated with the beloved subject of this
sketch, but few are now left to recall her single-hearted devotion to
apprehended duty, her unselfish generosity, her love of all beauty and
harmony, and her trustful reverence, free from pretence and cant. It is
not unlikely that the surviving sharers of her love and friendship may
feel the inadequateness of this brief memorial, for I close it with the
consciousness of having failed to fully delineate the picture which my
memory holds of a wise and brave, but tender and loving woman, of whom it
might well have been said, in the words of the old Hebrew text, "Many,
daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."