Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/753

always been her home is the one to which her grandfather removed, when her father, now a man of eighty-one, was a boy less than three years of age. Her mother was Amanda Willard, a grand- MARY EASTMAN WARD. daughter of Rev. Elijah Willard, of Dublin, N. H., a "minute man" and chaplain in the Revolution. Her mother was Mary's first and best teacher. The love of poetry was a birthright. She could recite many hymns before she could read. She wrote her first poem in the summer following her thirteenth birthday, and since then she has written much. She has poems in " Poets and Poetry of Vermont," and has contributed to the "Vermont Chronicle" and other State papers, the "Golden Rule," "Union Signal" and others. She has a poem in "Woman in Sacred Song." She is now living in North Danville, Vt

WARD, Mrs. May Alden, author, burn in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, 1st March, 1853. She is in the sixth generation from John and Pnscilla Alden. As a school-girl her favorite studies were literature and the languages. MAY ALDEN WARD. At the age of nineteen she was graduated from the Ohio Wesleyan University, and one year later, in 1873, she became the wife of Rev. William G. Ward. Numerous translations and newspaper and magazine articles gave early evidence of Mrs. Ward's versatility. Her special liking for studies in Italian. French and German literature was strengthened by two years of travel in Europe, and in 1887 she published a comprehensive and attractive life of Dante, which at once won for her high rank as a thorough scholar and discriminating and graphic biographer. She issued in 1891 a life of Petrarch, no less fascinating than its predecessor. She has achieved popularity as a parlor lecturer. Her series of lectures on French and German literature was one of the most entertaining literary features of the season before her departure from her home in Cleveland, Ohio. A volume of essays on those subjects is to be issued, and a course of lectures on the early life and literature of New England is of yet more recent preparation. During her residence in Cleveland, she was a member of the Ohio Woman's Press Association, and was made president of the East End Conversational Club. Her home is now in Franklin, Mass., where she is in touch with many of the literary circles of the East, while prosecuting her chosen work.

WARE, Mrs. Mary, poet, born in Monroe county, Tenn., 11th April, 1828. Her maiden name was Mary Harris, a name that has long been prominent in southern literature. Her early youth was spent amid the beautiful scenery of east Tennessee, and to the charm of her surroundings was added the intellectual companionship of a brother, Edmund K. Harris, whose poetic gifts were of an order that gave promise of a brilliant future, and the loving instruction of a father, who was not only eminent as a lawyer, but possessed discriminating literary taste. MARY WARE. Just as she reached womanhood, her parents moved to Shelby county, Ala., to which State her brother had preceded them, and he had already begun a successful literary career, when his sudden death in Mobile threw a shadow across the life of the sister. Her verses have more than sustained the merit they early promised. They have been published by all the leading magazines and periodicals of the South, many of which belonged to ante-bellum days. "The South" published in New York City contained her contributions for twenty years. In 1863 she became the wife of Horace Ware, who was born in Lynn, Mass., but reared in the South and widely known as a pioneer in the development of the iron industries of Alabama. Mr. Ware died in July, 1890, and Mrs. Ware has since resided in Birmingham, Ala., where her home circle is brightened by the presence of four nieces, children of a surviving brother. Besides poetry she has written some