Like many others who have reflected honor on the State, he was a son of Mississippi by adoption, a New Englander by birth. Son of William and Charlotte Ward, he was born in August, 1823, at Litchfield, Connecticut, an historic village, the early home of the Beechers; once noted also for its famous law school, attended by many from the South, John C. Calhoun among the number. Scarcely less was it famous for the beauty of the surrounding scenery and for the aristocracy of its leading families, who boasted their descent from old English houses as much as did the Virginians of their Cavalier and the Carolinians of their Huguenot ancestry. Social aristocracy in New England was a more prominent feature of life there than is commonly supposed. Among the leading families of Litchfield was that of the Wards. William, father of the subject of this sketch, was a jeweler by occupation, a man of integrity and unusual intelligence; wealthy until middle life, when it appears that reverses overtook him. For this reason his children, excepting one, perhaps, did not receive a college education as was intended. John became an Episcopal clergyman; Elias a jeweler, like his father; Henry, sorely disappointed in not being able to attend Yale College, scholarly, poetic, took reluctantly to printing an editorial work; Mary Charlotte, literary in her tastes, married a wealthy gentleman, traveled in Europe, and wrote sketches of travel and a number of poems. Of Henry Ward, a word more in passing to indicate more fully the literary leaning of the family. At the age of thirteen, his poem, "Novel Reading; or The Feast of Fiction," published in the local paper, gave him notoriety and raised great expectations. Thwarted in his college aspirations looking toward the ministry, he grew melancholy and excessively reserved. After forty years of life as a practical printer and editor, he left at his decease manuscripts in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, versification of the Books of Job and Lamentations, and a volume of hymns. His claim to the well-known hymn, "I Would Not Live Always," generally accredited to William Augustus Muhlenberg, and also to the poem, "Tell Me Ye Winged Winds," usually ascribed to Charles Mackay, is set forth in Harpel's Poets and Poetry of Printerdom. In it, too, may be found other poems by him and several by his sister Mary, then Mrs. Webster.