“What is the name of that star?” I have heard her ask more than one man of science. “It changes color like a flash light in a light house, flashes from white to green and then to red.” At last she asked the question of a man who could answer it and learned that her star’s name was Aldebaran and that is one of the stars of the constellation of Taurus. Her horoscope was never cast, but I believe that she was born under the influence of that wonderful star that flashes first the color of the diamond, then the ruby, and last the emerald, and that when she was born, Aldebaran danced! Though she so rarely spoke of such matters, we who lived with her were fed at second hand by that deep limpid stream, the river of immortal life, in which she grew rooted deep. One of the many manifestations of this was the joyousness with which she took up each day and its little cares. She always came into the room in the morning like a child who has some good news to share with the family. Those wonderful spirits, that overflowed in every sort of wit, jest and antic, took the sting from the bitterest nature; in her company the satirist grew kind, the cynic humane. A deep spiritual joy seemed to enwrap her like a sort of enveloping climate. Where she was, the sun shone, the sky was blue, birds sang, brooks babbled, for so tremendous was her spiritual force that it always conquered. It sometimes seemed to me as if I was conscious of a sort of war of temperaments between her and some pessimistic or cynical nature. It was like one of those days when, as we say, “the sun is trying to come out.” The sun of her presence never failed to come out, to banish the gray fog of the blues, the sufferings of the irritable or the disheartened. When people came to talk to her of their troubles, as they often did, the troubles seemed to shrink like the clouds on a dark day, leaving first a little peep of blue visible, and finally the whole sky, clear and fervid. One word more, take it as a legacy, a keepsake from her. I asked her for a statement of the ideal aim of life. She paused a moment, then summed up the mighty matter in one sentence, clear and cosmic as a single rain-drop, a very epitome of her own life: “To Learn, To Teach, To Serve, And To Enjoy!” End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The eleventh hour in the life of Julia Ward Howe, by Maud Howe Elliott