Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe
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Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910
Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe
Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Feminists -- United States -- Biography; Howe, Julia Ward, 1819-1910
When Holy Week came, the congregation begged her to hold special
services. They wished their young people to understand that these sacred
days meant as much to them as to the surrounding Catholics. Accordingly
she and her companion "dressed the little church with flowers. It looked
charmingly. Flowers all along the railing [here follows in the Journal a
pen-and-ink sketch], flowers in the pulpit over my head. Church was
crowded. Many people outside and at the windows."
She always remembered with pleasure one feature of her Easter sermon,
her attempt to describe Dante's vision of a great cross in the heavens,
formed of star clusters, each cluster bearing the name of Christ. "The
thought," she says, "that the mighty poet of the fourteenth century
should have something to impart to these illiterate negroes was very
dear to me."
One of the party has an undying impression of this Easter service: the
shabby little chapel crowded with dark faces, and the preacher, standing
touched by a ray of sunlight, speaking to that congregation of simple
black people. In her notes she speaks of these services.
"A pastoral charge bringing me near to the hearts and sympathies of the
people. I have preached five times in the little church, including Good
Friday and Easter Monday. This service, which has not been without its
difficulties, is so much better to me in remembrance than anything else
I have done here that I must make a little break and pause before I
speak of other things.
"In this pause I remember my prayer at Puerto Plata, that I and mine
might come to this new region with a reverent and teachable spirit. That
prayer was an earnest one to me. I hope it has, as all prayers should,
accomplished its own fulfilment. I have been here among dear people. I
find all the human varieties in this society, not digested and
harmonized by noble culture, but existing and asking for the
centralizing and discriminating agencies which in civilization sort out
the different tastes, characters, and capacities, and assign to each its
task, giving devotion its wings and crime its treadmill. This little
population in a great country, a country in which Nature allows no one
to starve, has lived and so shown its right to live and maintain itself.
It has accomplished its political division from a state antipathetic to
it, having its dark face turned fixedly towards barbarism [Hayti].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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