In 1862, Mrs. Howe published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ her best known poem, _Battle Hymn of the Republic_. This inspiring hymn reached the prisoners in Libby Prison through Chaplain McCabe, who sang it to celebrate a victory of the Union troops. After Chaplain McCabe was released from prison, and while he was lecturing in Washington, he narrated this incident. This attracted the attention of the public, so that the beautiful hymn soon became popular throughout the country. Later, it became the battle cry of the Union army, being sung by the men as they marched into action. When Colonel T. W. Higginson urged Mrs. Howe to sign a call for a Woman Suffrage Convention to be held in Boston, she not only signed, but attended the Convention, and later became intimately associated with the movement, often making speeches on the subject. She was a delegate to the Congress for Prison Reform in England, where, besides speaking earnestly against the flogging of prisoners, she also urged arbitration as the means of settling international disputes. In her own country, she organized the Women's Peace Festival, with the object of turning the attention of women to the horrors and needlessness of war. Thus we find this remarkable woman always in the van of progress and generally much ahead of her time. In 1876, after a brief illness, Dr. Howe died. Mrs. Howe then took her daughter Maud to Europe, where she remained for two years, trying by travel to dull the sharp edge of her affliction. It was at this time that Mrs. Howe took up the study of Greek, in which she became very proficient, and the study of which she kept up until her last illness. For a long period of years Mrs. Howe lectured and wrote on subjects which concerned the social improvement of mankind. Almost her last appearance in public was at the reception given to the representatives of twenty-seven nations by the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City. Mrs. Howe read an original poem written for the occasion. While she read, the entire audience stood respectfully, and as she sat down, all joined in singing the _Battle Hymn of the Republic_. Her really last appearance in public was but two weeks before her death, at the inauguration of the second president of Smith College, at which function she was given the degree of LL. D. Mrs. Howe died October 18, 1910, at her country place in Portsmouth. She will long be remembered for her work in the anti-slavery cause and for the advancement of woman, for her literary merits, and for her beautiful domestic life. [Illustration: QUEEN VICTORIA _From an old engraving_] QUEEN VICTORIA (1819-1901) "Her court was pure; her life serene; God gave her peace; her land reposed; A thousand claims to reverence closed In her as Mother, Wife and Queen." —_Alfred Tennyson_