Laura E. Richards, Maud Howe, Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, in two volumes, with portraits and other illustrations: volume 1

“ [286] got on so far in this, my eighty-second year. My greatest trouble is that I use so poorly the precious time spared to me. Latterly I have been saying to myself, ‘Can you not see that the drama is played out?’ This partly because my children wish me to give up public speaking.”

“March 4.... To New England Woman's Club; first time this year, to my great regret and loss. I was cordially welcomed.... A thought suddenly came to me, namely, that the liberal education of women would give the death-blow to superstition. I said, ‘We women have been the depositaries of religious sensibility, but we have also furnished the impregnable storehouse of superstition, sometimes gracious, sometimes desperately cruel and hurtful to our race.’ No one noticed this, but I hold fast to it....”

“March 8. ... To Symphony Concert in afternoon, which I enjoyed but little, the music being of the multi-muddle order so much in vogue just now. An air of Haydn's sounded like a sentence of revelation in a chatter..”

It may have been after this concert that she wrote these lines, found in one of her notebooks:--

Such ugly noises never in my life
My ears endured, such hideous fiddle-strife.
A dozen street bands playing different tunes,
A choir of chimney sweeps with various runes,
The horn that doth to farmer's dinner call,
The Chinese gong that serves in wealthier hall,
The hammer, scrub brush, and beseeching broom,
While here and there the guns of freedom boom,
“Tzing! bang! this soul is saved!” “Clang! clang! it is n't!”
And mich and dich and ich and sich and sisn't!