We greatly regret to record the death in the United
States
of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe in her ninety-second year. She will never be forgotten as the author of " The Battle Hymn
of the Republic." We have read that this poem, which became an inspiration to the Federal Army in the Civil War, was written after she had been taken by a friend to the top of the Capitol, or to some high hill outside Washington, and had there looked down on the camp-fires of the Army of the Potomac. She went to bed, and woke up in the middle of the night, when the words of the battle hymn describing what
she had seen formed themselves in her mind and she then wrote them down. Thus one verse runs :— " I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps, I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps : His day is marching on."
The hymn is unequal in power and form, but its grandeur and passion are undeniable, and it probably did more than any single force to stir the North to a perception of the sacred- ness of its cause.
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