Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: perament. So do many people. It was the habit of study, of concentration, of work, carefully cultivated from the first, held on to in spite of difficulties — she had plenty of them — that wrought what seemed to some of her contemporaries a miracle. She could say like Adam in Shakespeare's play "As You Like It:" " My age is as a lusty winter; Frosty, but kindly: let me go with you; I'll do the service of a younger man In all your business and necessities." " Let me go with you! " This is what Age is forever saying to Youth. " Do not leave me behind — I can still serve! " So long as Age makes good the claim, heydey, headlong, good-natured Youth lets the veteran march in its glorious ranks. Youth does not crowd him out, as the veteran too often thinks, he drops out because he " cannot keep the pace!" The reason she did not drop out was because she made good her claim. The children and grandchildren of those with whom she first enlisted, were content to have her march with them, still in the van. Her training, from her very start in life, made her a cosmopolitan; one of the factors of this world citizenship was her very early study of foreign languages. French, Italian and Latin she knew almost from the time she could speak, so that she gathered into her spirit the essence of the race genius of the Latins. Later came the Teutonic baptism, for she only learned German at fourteen, when her adored brother, Sam Ward, came home from Heidelberg, brimming over with the songs, the poetry, the philosophy of Germany. She studied Schiller and Goethe with ardor — among her treasures, we have found a long autograph letter from Goethe to her tutor, Dr. Cogswell. In her youth there were still cultivated French people living in New York, who had taken refuge there during the reign of terr...