Maud Howe Elliott

“ I said what I could for Rhode Island. In the evening to a banquet of the Equal Suffrage League where all three parties were represented. A horrid, heckling woman spoke for Taft, and another, hardly any better, for Wilson. Jane Addams, all in white, for Roosevelt, towered above them all like the Jungfrau. Her expressive, grave face was an inspiration to us all. Her speech, her very presence made the trip worth while. Miss Carpenter spoke well and Frances Keller was superb; she is like a black diamond, full of fire and power. ”

“ I am often asked in these days to subscribe money for a playground, attendant guardians and new-fangled apparatus for play. At such times I am glad that I was young when I was! No playground could ever make up for the splendid freedom of those old Boston streets, where the children of my time were turned loose to amuse themselves. When the old games, played by the girls of Athens and Rome, grew stale, we invented new games of our own. ”

“ But when, on the other hand, one reads the reply of the Göttingen Professors to the appeal of Dublin University, or the letters of Strauss and Mommsen, or consider what is implied in the treatment of Jacoby,—is not there the strongest ground for apprehending that Continental Europe is to pass under a sway of a mightier military despotism than the world has seen since the days of Macedon and of Rome?
More and more I feel that the hope for Humanity in this age has made its home in our Republic. And it lies with you, women of our Free and United Nation, to open the new era for our Race! ”

“ Through a gloomy stone doorway, along a dark passage to an inner court with borders of violets in full bloom, palms, oranges, fig and banana trees. Through a cypress swamp of skeleton trees hung with the ghostly Spanish moss to lovely Lake Pontchartrain.
During the Exposition New Orleans became a cosmopolitan nerve center, as did Philadelphia in the Centennial of 1876 and Chicago during the World’s Fair of 1893. The vivid passionate city with its old Place d’Armes, wrought-iron balconies, hedges of Cherokee roses, broad-spreading live oaks, was crowded with travelers from all over the world. ”

“ Crispi laughs at the attempts to kill him, and they have begun to say he has a charmed life. The King looks as if he would like to be in anybody’s boots but his own. Some of Crispi’s acts would have brought about a revolution in any other country; the King alone has prevented this, and the unconscious triumph of his simple, honest character is most impressive. He is not a brilliant man, but he loves his people and Italy better than his own dynasty, which he has not scrupled to jeopardize. Crispi is perfectly sincere in the belief that for the country’s sake his government must continue. ”

“ Beside my studies in Rome with Costa, I had worked a season in Paris. All I had to show for this were some passable paintings of flowers. I lacked the artist hand. While I have continued to study art from that day to this, I then definitely renounced the idea of becoming a painter, yielding to the inevitable family calling of literature. I had learned that it is not enough to feel the love of beauty, the yearning for artistic expression; an artist must have art in his fingers as well as in his soul.
Among our neighbors at this time were the Q.’s, parlous dull people. ”

“ Before the organ stood the bronze statue of Beethoven, now in Symphony Hall.
“Crawford’s statue seems to be listening to the music,” my mother whispered, as the organist struck the keys and a lovely air of Palestrina’s rolled from the organ, shaking the souls of the men and women gathered in this temple of the arts. Music must have its commercial side, like all other arts; but in those days, if it were there, it was hidden. The men who built the Music Hall, and who made Boston the musical center it still remains, were true servants of Apollo. ”

“ It seemed as if all elder Boston had come to the obsequies of one of the last great New Englanders. The service was impressive from its very impassiveness. No rending either of hearts or garments, no shrouding of pale faces with crape,—all stern, granite, real. Barrett Wendell had been that morning to the funeral of his choreman at the Catholic cathedral. He compared the gorgeous ceremony for this humble servant with the incense, the vestments, the velvet pall, the emotional music, to the grave function at King’s Chapel. ”

“ It was so like Newport, the cool blue water so very native, that I felt a little homesick. Tea at the Quisisana, a delightful hotel but expensive. The moon, a blood-red crescent, made a splendid descent behind the Sorrentine Peninsula. We watched it set from the balcony outside our room. The Bay of Naples was a pale turquoise, the sky old-rose color. The people here are as beautiful as tradition holds—the handsomest I ever saw. ”

“ I can’t get over the feeling that all the enthusiasm at home is excessive—if we were going to hit a man of our own size—you see I know Spain very well. It may be necessary for our lusty youth of a nation to put its heel on the neck of a broken and aged nation, but it should be done in the spirit I feel in McKinley, sternly and firmly and without fireworks or bunkum. This may sound like treason at home, but it looks so to every Roman American I have talked with. ”

“ He was eager to push on to his studio in Rome. All the afternoon I had been drawn as by a magnet to the mysterious blue coast of Africa. Here we were at the Pillars of Hercules; should we ever be here again? If an ally had not loomed up at that moment I should never have lived my seven Arabian days and nights. He introduced himself with a sweeping bow.
“I am Ferguson, friend of the Americans. You are from Boston; you live, perhaps, upon the Common? I know the best people there, the Quincys, the Shaws, the Winthrops. ”

“ The whole life of Tangier seems to be lived in the streets. The market is a perfect babel of strange tongues. Veiled women seated on the ground sell queer flat loaves of bread and great bunches of violets. The stalls are piled with golden tangerines, tiny limes, mammoth lemons, scarlet peppers, purple eggplant—every fruit or vegetable you ever saw and many you never heard of!
The children are very handsome with enormous eyes and skins of bronze velvet! The Moorish is the best Oriental dress I have seen, save that of the Bedouins of the Pyramids, which it resembles. ”

“ Henry James is dead. The news came to-day. A sudden warmth of old friendship, a kindness of other years leaps up within me, and the memory of how he looked at our house in Rome on a certain birthday of his that corresponds to my own latest milestone.
It was a warm day in mid-April. We were lunching on the terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci, among the roses that shielded us from the windows of the Vatican. ”

“ On this, his last visit to Rome, Garibaldi once more urged the Romans to make a supreme effort to banish the fever from their city by building the Tiber Embankment and thus preventing the river from rising and overflowing its banks. The Romans did for Garibaldi what they would not have done for any other man, and put through that splendid piece of engineering. Though to-day his statue rides in bronze on the Janiculum, Rome’s greatest monument to him remains the Tiber Embankment. To-day we recognize that he, the man of vision, saw the future truer than Crispi the statesman ”

“ We enjoyed for several seasons the Sargent house, Number 13 Chestnut Street, for many years the home of the Radical Club.
As founder and leader of the Rovers, I had a sense of responsibility for the afternoon’s fun. Life has brought me few sensations more thrilling than the peculiar musical sound that, on certain cold winter mornings, roused me from sleep. Metallic, muffled, rhythmic, all-pervading, a solo under my window, and a distant chorus thundering from every street and alley on Beacon Hill. ”

“ I remember the early years of the new century as a time of inspiration; the spirit of hope was abroad, the whole world seemed to have received a new impulse; good resolutions blossomed into good works. Men felt their strength to be as the strength of ten, and women that the twentieth century was theirs as no other had ever been. Like everybody else, I felt the impetus and finally finished, in collaboration with my sister Florence Hall, our long-delayed book, “Dr. Howe and his Famous Pupil, Laura Bridgman.” ”

“ Filled with an immense gratitude for all that I have to be thankful for: health, a beloved and loving husband, a warm house, plenty to eat, a faithful helper, farther off a circle of kindly neighbors, and, not too far away, dear sisters, a beloved brother, nieces, nephews, friends, and oh, my country! Well may we Americans hold our heads high. This is our hour of success, in spite of Roosevelt’s defeat—if he is defeated! ”

“ Columbus crossed the ocean blue!
The old intoxication seized upon my mother and me the moment we stepped out of Saint Pancras Station and into the moldy-smelling four-wheeler. Alice, fresh from boarding school, was not less deeply stirred perhaps, but showed it less, according to the manner of her generation. A fellow traveler on the train had said to us:
“I call this the American season! You Americans are furnishing more of the year’s sensations than ever.” ”

“ The day was clear, the air like a caress after the northeaster we left in Boston. The city is gay with flags and flowers: the Pickwick Club is hung with garlands and live oak branches, banners, and cotton bales. The Mississippi is a vast yellow river that cuts the continent in two and flows past New Orleans without a ripple. We went by steamer to the Exposition grounds with Governor McEnery, the foreign consuls, and other bigwigs. There were dusky Mexican soldiers, with a military band, to whose strains we marched to the main Exposition building,—it covers thirty-three acres! ”

“ In the audience were some of the men who had created Chicago,—Marshall Field, John Crerar, Charles Farwell, Wirt{219} Dexter, Franklin MacVeagh, Potter Palmer, and scions of the powerful Pullman, Deering, and McCormick clans. The generation to which these men belonged loved their city as other men love a favorite child, with a passionate devotion and a pride I have never known equaled. That is the secret of Chicago’s strength; it is founded upon love, the strongest thing in the world. ”

“ We gave a ball for the officers and the townspeople, the large rooms of the palace serving excellently for the festivities. The American officers danced with the pretty Dominican girls, who wore fireflies in their dark hair for jewels; for ribbons garlands of flowers twined about their waists and shoulders.
The day after the ball I experienced my first earthquake. It was a breathless afternoon, and I was taking the inevitable siesta. As I lay asleep under my mosquito bar, I heard a low rumbling sound, unlike anything I had ever known before. ”

“ The capital of the Moors is perched on a high hill behind which rise the snow-clad Sierras. The town of Granada lies at the foot of the hill reserved for the palaces and gardens. The exterior of the Alhambra is grim and simple, but noble in its somber strength. The interior—but it is indescribable! The beauty of design, the wealth of color, the wonderful harmony, the romance, the hot passionate quality of it all makes Greece seem cold and Italy thin compared to it. ”

“ Athens is much improved. The roads are better, the streets cleaner, the whole city better kept than I remembered it. The people look prosperous; there is a general air of well-being in all classes.
We hurried to the Acropolis, where we found the old immortal glories and much that was new and interesting in the small museum behind the Parthenon. The two most precious objects of Greek art which the last twenty years’ research has brought to light, you are familiar with,—the Victory untying her sandal and the Hermes of Olympia. ”

“ I am aghast as you must be at the Cretan horror; and when the newspapers speak of the United States having helped the Cretans so much in the revolt against their Turkish masters in 1867, I think of Papa and you, who were the moving spirits in that great and generous American aid. I feel so little and helpless, I wish I could have been a giant too! ”

“ You are carried out of the world of mere personal artistic accomplishment into a universe of mysterious, terrible, delightful, primitive experiences. Gods, dragons, and talking birds seem as natural in this fairy realm as electric cars in Boston. You lose the personality of the artists, the wonderful art of the scene painter, the grandeur of the orchestra, all in the sublimated whole. ”

“ The ladies’ gallery where we sat was hot, crowded, uncomfortable, and screened like the musharabeah window of an Egyptian harem. I disliked it so much that I never went there again.
People who live in London must inevitably find the circle where they belong, and remain more or less fixed therein. The charm of that first London season was that we were made welcome in a dozen different circles and counted among our friends extreme conservatives and arrant radicals.
After all these years the people I remember best are the literary men and the artists. ”

“ We owed our glimpses of the world of sport largely to Lord Dunraven, owner of the famous yacht Thistle, who was attentive to us for Uncle Sam’s sake. He drove us down to the Derby, where we were his guests in the royal inclosure, and had a close view of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Prince, later Edward VII, was not far from forty, and looked rather like Holbein’s portrait of Henry the Eighth. The Princess was much beloved, though the people of the court and the diplomats found her hard to talk with on account of her deafness. ”

“ She looked at every little drawing in the studio, laughing heartily at the portrait of the Duke of Cambridge, exclaiming:
“It is the old man to the very life.”
The visit lasted half an hour and was as friendly and easy as heart could desire. The visitors departed in a blaze of scarlet and gold lace, with congratulations and farewells. Lord Currie said that the Queen had been really interested in the work. She certainly said things to me that were pleasant to hear.
Queen Margherita has always been the friend and patron of artists and musicians and is greatly beloved by them. ”