Clara Barton’s lecture is beautifully written. JOHN B. GOUGH.
The treasure-house of the world is of books. Books are one’s chosen friends, and friends are of souls with like aspirations. From the contents of books character is made. The legacy in books is what youth bequeaths to maturity. In youth Clara Barton entered the “true university,” that of books. She read not only books from the shelf but found “books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Her favorite authors were Shakespeare, Longfellow, Milton, Keats, Schiller, Bunyan, Tennyson, Scott and Browning.
Had she followed the promptings of her head, and not her heart, Clara Barton might have been a Mrs. Sigourney. One of her admirers says that, had she been an author, “her gracefulness of expression, her buoyancy of thought, and brilliancy of imagery” would have placed her in a class with Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë. But Clara Barton is now in a class—in a class by herself—and throughout the future the student of humanity will study Clara Barton.
Clara Barton’s descriptions of battle, and other, scenes are surpassing in vividness—unequalled. In her diaries, which she kept for more than half-a-century, are nuggets of human wisdom. Her wise sayings, as those of Benjamin Franklin, would fill a volume. Such Clara Barton Red Cross maxims, and other wise sayings as appear in these pages, are but the flotsam and jetsam of a cargo of writings, the cargo partly wrecked and no part of it available by the author.
Clara Barton was a nurse, but only as Lincoln was a rail-splitter. As an executive, Clara Barton is accredited as the greatest _man_ in America, by one of America’s greatest statesmen; as the greatest woman in the world, by one of America’s greatest generals; as having done more for humanity than any other woman since the time of Mary of Galilee, by a great State Executive. By a great writer, it is said that through reading everything is within one’s reach. Clara Barton’s mental reach into national and world problems at least widens and heightens the possibilities of womankind.
Her Red Cross lectures are not “Caudle Lectures to Ladies”; they, including official reports, are high-class state papers which would do credit to the White House—literary, argumentative, statesmanlike. For twenty-three years in America Clara Barton was the Red Cross encyclopedia, the Red Cross dictionary. She was also the Red Cross legislature, the Red Cross Supreme Court, the Commander-in-Chief of our Red Cross battalions, at home and abroad. Although one of the “remonstrants,” in the press, referred to the Red Cross as “Clara Barton’s Bread and Butter Brigade” the Achilles in that brigade had won for humanity the greatest battle on American soil.