Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/139

 Julia Ward Howe; Emma Lazarus 121 as its title was a journal of progress and a record of charity, wherein were continued those ideas of liberal Christianity that underlie an earlier publication, Old and New, which he had founded in 1869. To both he contributed many papers, while articles on historical and literary themes came frequently from his pen, in addition to many stories of discovery and adventure, of invention, of war, and of the sea. In his recently published letters there is further disclosure of his mental fertility and of his kind and practical Christianity; although his style is simple to the point of bareness, and the ordinary literary graces are absent. Hale is not the only American author whose fame is inti- mately inwoven with a single piece of work. The same period in our history that brought forth his masterpiece is responsible for the immortal poem to which the marching feet and the ded- icated hearts of myriad soldiers kept time as they swept on to bloody struggles with The Battle Hymn of the Republic on their lips. But Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) was not alone the creator of the most potent of our battle poems. ' Her place is secure in the record of many liberalizing movements, espe- cially those which had to do with the social and political eleva- tion of her own sex ; and, beyond this, she was the author of de- lightful papers ranging in subject matter from a paper on Aristophanes, prepared as a lecture at the Concord School of Philosophy, to illuminating studies of social manners — such as The Salon in America and Is Polite Society Polite? — full of intelligent criticism and that discriminating humour which is yet too serious to indulge in any easy satire. Her achieve- ment, as a whole, entitles her to rank as the most notable woman of letters bom and bred in the metropolis of America; although ■ another woman belonging, like Julia Ward Howe, to an old New York family displayed at least equal intellectual rarity. Nor was the regard wherein Emma Lazarus (1849-87) was held by such men as Emerson, Gilder, Stedman, Channing, Eggleston, Dana, and Godkin due alone to those poems and essays which did more than the writings of any other American author to instil among Christians a sympathy for that people of whom Emma Lazarus was so brave an exponent. Quite apart from her poems and articles on Jewish themes, there can be no ■ See Book III, Chap. ii.