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a great undertaking, a vision of health and of peace.
In the chair beside it sat a tall, bony figure, devoid of grace, a countenance almost redeemed from plainness by two kindly blue eyes, but overshadowed by the dark problems of the moment...
When we had left the presence, one of our number exclaimed, “Helpless Honesty!”
As if Honesty could ever be helpless.)
The “
Battle Hymn of the
Republic” has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Armenian.
Written in the dark on a scrap of Sanitary Commission paper, it has been printed in every imaginable form, from the beautiful parchment edition presented to the author on her seventieth birthday by the
New England Woman's Club, down to the cover of a tiny brochure advertising a cure for consumption.
It has also been set to music many times, but never successfully.
It is inseparably wedded to the air for which it was written, an air simple, martial, and dignified: no attempt to divorce the two could ever succeed.
From the time of writing it to that of her death, she was constantly besieged by requests for autograph copies of part or the whole of the hymn.
Sometimes the petitioners realized what they asked, as when
Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote:--
I can well understand what a Frankenstein's monster such a creation grows to be — such a poem as the “Battle Hymn,” when it has become the sacred scroll of millions, each one of whom would fain obtain a copy of it.
Reasonable or unreasonable, she tried to meet every
