When she was sixteen her brother returned from several years of study in Germany, and a new world was opened to her--German philosophy and poetry, and simultaneously New York society; for at once he made the Ward home one of the social centers of the city. Julia became the reigning favorite and won everybody by her beauty and charm, her tact and ready wit and good humor. She continued her studies regularly, translating German and French and Italian poems, reading philosophy and writing verses. Visiting in Boston, she made the acquaintance of the literary group there--Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier and Holmes. Charles Sumner was her brother’s intimate friend, and one day when he and Longfellow were calling on Miss Ward they suggested driving over to the Perkins Institute for the Blind. They had frequently talked to her of its founder, Doctor Samuel Gridley Howe, the truest hero that America and their century had produced, and withal the best of comrades. The Chevalier, they named him, a Bayard without fear and without reproach. She knew something of the six years he had spent in Greece, fighting during the war for independence and serving as surgeon-in-chief. She knew of his pioneer work for educating the blind, and of his marvelous achievement in teaching Laura Bridgeman--the little blind and deaf and dumb girl, the statue which he had brought to life. When the three friends arrived Doctor Howe was absent, but before they had finished their tour of the building Sumner spied him from the window and called out, “There he is now, on his black horse.” The young lady saw him, “a noble rider on a noble steed,” and into her life he rode that day, like a medieval chevalier, in spite of the fact that he was forty and she only twenty-four, in spite of the fact that she had lived a gay social life and he was a serious reformer and philanthropist who believed that with the world so full of needy people no one had a right to luxury. Life with a reformer husband was not always the care-free thing Julia Ward had known, but she had shipped as mate for the voyage, she once said with a merry laugh, and added, “I can not imagine a more useful motto for married life.” She realized always that the deepest and most steadfast part of herself she owed to Doctor Howe. “But for the Chevalier, I should have been merely a woman of the world and a literary dabbler.” With all the cares and joys of a rich home life with her six children, she found time for study and writing. She published two volumes of verse, the first anonymously, but the secret could not be kept, for people declared that no one but Julia Ward Howe could be its author.