The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (Vol. 2 of 2)Barton, William E. (William Eleazar)
History
The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (Vol. 2 of 2)
Barton, William E. (William Eleazar)
American National Red Cross -- Biography; Barton, Clara, 1821-1912; Nurses -- United States -- Biography
This completed the childhood work, and the book is filled, in her more
mature hand, with complete poems, “The Pilgrim Fathers,--where are
they?” “The Burial of Arnold,” “The Hour of Prayer,” “Warren at Bunker
Hill,” “The Indian’s Lament,” “The Fall of Tecumseh,” and other poems,
heroic, patriotic, devotional, and ending with “Farewell to the Bride.”
Later she procured a bound volume, and in it she copied her favorite
poems, and wrote others of her own, in her most careful and painstaking
hand. Her “copper-plate” penmanship was never more exquisite than in
this volume, in which her own poems and the poems she loved are written
in order as she found or composed them.
No quality in Clara Barton was more marked than the breadth of her
sympathies. She shuddered at the thought of needless pain. I have a
crude little picture, a page out of a child’s book, which she found
in her childhood and preserved to the end of her life. It is entitled
“What came of firing a gun.” A dead bird lies on the ground, and is
approached on the one side by a boy with a gun in his hand and on the
other by a horrified girl. It is not a great work of art, but it tells
its story and conveys its lesson.
She never gave needless pain. She regarded all life as akin to the life
of God, and sacred with the imprint of God’s own image. She looked upon
all life that can suffer or enjoy, the life of bird and beast and fish,
as something on which it is a sin to inflict needless pain.
From the time she saw, in her little girlhood, the killing of an ox,
and felt that the blow that struck and crushed its skull had struck her
own head, she never saw pain without feeling it. She could have said
with Whitman of the suffering she saw--
My wounds on me grow livid as I lean
Upon my staff and look.
She did not merely sympathize with suffering; she suffered. She not
only was glad of other people’s joy; it was her joy. She rejoiced with
those that did rejoice and wept with those that wept. Not often do her
diaries record her weeping; and the tears she records as having shed
are oftener for others’ sorrows than for her own. Her sympathy was
genuine, and of the sort which can truly be called vicarious. She took
it upon herself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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