HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

BY ROSE TERRY COOKE.

Mrs. Stowe's Father, Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher—His Fame and Worth—His Wife, Roxana Foote—Mrs. Stowe's Early Training—Incidents in Her Childhood—A Famous School—Reminiscences of Her Girlhood—Early Passion for Writing—Marriage to Prof. Calvin E. Stowe—Life on the Banks of the Ohio—Where and How She Received Her First Impressions of Slavery—What Led to the Writing of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"—Difficulties Under Which it was Written—How it was Received—Excitement it Created—Mrs. stowe's Visit to England—Her Reception—The True Story of "A Vindication of Lady Byron"—Celebrating Mrs. Stowe's Seventy-first Birthday—Her Two Homes—Looking Toward the Other Side of Jordan.

  HARRIET ELIZABETH BEECHER was born at Litchfield, Conn., June 14, 1811.

  She was the seventh child of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote, his wife. Her parents were both remarkable people. Mr. Beecher was a man of keen intellect, great moral courage and energy, whose mental force gave him almost directly after he entered the ministry a high place among his compeers. His inauguration of the temperance reform; his struggles for the permanent establishment of the church of Christ in New England at a time when heresy and infidelity threatened its existence as an organization; his advocacy of revivals, and his active agency in bringing them about, will keep his name famous in the ecclesiastical annals of Connecticut as long as those records last; and his name will be always revered at Lane Seminary, near Cincinnati, Ohio, as not only the head of that institution for many years, but its founder in a sense more vital far than the mere contribution

  Roxana Foote, his wife, was a woman of rare virtues: cultivated, highly educated, and accomplished; in the simplicity of her nature and the purity of her warm young heart she married this penniless minister, and took up the work of a minister's wife with unshrinking devotion; she was indeed the intended woman of Paradise, "a helpmeet unto him." In poverty, in sorrow, in struggle of every kind, the heart of her husband trusted in her, and leaned upon her as a strong staff; and when she died he said afterwards that his "first sensation was a sort of terror, like that of a child suddenly shut out alone in the dark." Yet she, with all her clarity of mind, her fulness of lofty thought, and keen enjoyment of literature and art, never cried out for her "rights," or clamored for suffrage. Calm, serene, tender,—

she moved on through the crowding duties of an arduous life, became the mother of nine children, one of whom went before her, and died in a peace that was triumph and a strength that was rapture.

  Beside these pillars of the home temple, Harriet Beecher was also compassed about with other and similar stimulating companionships. Her aunt, Mary Hubbard, a beautiful and fascinating girl, who married early a West-Indian planter, and after a few years of sinking health and failing heart came home to die, rallied in her native air, and filled the Beecher homestead with sparkling life for a few short years.

  Beside these pillars of the home temple, Harriet Beecher was also compassed about with other and similar stimulating companionships. Her aunt, Mary Hubbard, a beautiful and fascinating girl, who married early a West-Indian planter, and after a few years of sinking health and failing heart came home to die, rallied in her native air, and filled the Beecher homestead with sparkling life for a few short years. Although Harriet was but a baby when this aunt died, no doubt what she heard of her in the family tradition, especially of her horror of slavery, sank into that receptive mind and was brooded over till an ardent sympathy was established

  Her mother's mother, with whom the child spent much time, was a serene and kindly lady of the old days; a great reader and thinker; and Harriet Foote, the aunt, whose name Harriet Beecher bore, was a woman of keen and versatile wit; while Esther Beecher, her father's sister, was a practical, unselfish, utterly devoted woman of vigorous intellect and quiet humor, who measured out the things of this life as conscientiously and accurately as if they were the outer court service of the temple in which her inner soul devoutly adored.

  Born of such parents, living in such an atmosphere, it is not wonderful that the children grew up so remarkable in their development and individuality, that an old saying was readapted for them, and it became a proverb that "There are three kinds of people in the world: the good, the bad, and the Beechers."

  Nor, in the wisdom of her home training, was the precocious child allowed to sacrifice her health; her home was on that wide and breezy hill in Litchfield from which can be seen still a long stretch of characteristic New England scenery; rolling hills, sad brown stretches of fallow field and rocky upland, here and there a glimmering pond; then, great sweeps of forest, far and near; and over all a broad, bright sky, its vast azure expanse swept with fleecy clouds, darkened with the black banners of the thunder, or livid with north eastern rains. She ran wild among these trees and hills, went putting in the gorgeous haze and blaze of October; or gathered the wistful delicate blooms of spring; the red strawberries, fragrant and sweet beyond the giants of to-day, enticed her into the June-sweet pastures; and the gorgeous lilies of the hay-field tempted her in summer; there was nothing, foreign or unknown to her in the kindly fruitage of

  As she says herself: "I was educated, first and foremost by nature, wonderful, beautiful, ever-changing as she is in that cloudland, Litchfield."

  Yet her home-life went hand in hand with the out-of-door; her heart kept even beat with the cheery, social, mirthful, happy course of her daily living; and her mind was fed with conversation of the sort that is not concerned with the day's gossip, or the hasty and hard judgment of neighbor and friend.

  In that crowded parsonage, about the fire at night, books and authors were discussed; the awful realities of religion reverently explored; the moral situation of the church and the world expounded and agitated; and all regarded from but one standpoint, that outlook from the side of God the Creator and Governor, which lifts the human soul above the misty passions of earth and gives to its vision the width and clearness of heaven.

  In the light of her after-life it is significant that she heard and remembered an incident which happened one day in her childhood, and is best recorded in her own words:—

  "I remember hearing father relate the account of Byron's separation from his wife; and one day hearing him say with a sorrowful countenance, as if announcing the death of some one very interesting to him:

  "'My dear, Byron is dead,—gone.'

  "After being a while silent, he said:—

  "'Oh, I'm sorry Byron is dead. I did hope he would have lived to do something for Christ. What a harp he might have swept!'

  "The whole impression made upon me by the conversation was solemn and painful. I remember taking my basket for strawberries that afternoon and going over to a strawberryfield on Chestnut Hill, but I was too dispirited to do anything, so I lay down among the daisies and looked up into the blue sky, and thought of that great eternity into which Byron had entered, and wondered how it might be with his soul."

  When Harriet Beecher was but five years old her beautiful, tender mother, after a brief illness, went home to the land which indeed she seemed only to have left for a short time to bless this earth, leaving behind her an undying memory, an unfiding love and sorrow. Eight motherless children were left to mourn her, and not one could recollect an impatient word, an unjust judgment, even when Harriet, like a very little pickle as she was, beguiled her brothers and sisters to eat up a bag of rare tulip-roots under the impression that they were onions and very nice, using thereto all the persuasion her baby language and coaxing eyes could bring to the subject. She herself says that when her mother entered on the scene,—

  "There was not even a momentary expression of impatience, but she sat down, and calmly, sweetly, told them what lovely tulips would have risen from those roots had they spared them."

  Perhaps only as passionate a lover of flowers as Roxana Beecher was can appreciate this wonderful temper.

  A year passed by under dear and good Aunt Esther's household rule, and then a new mother came to govern and guide at the parsonage. She too was a lovely and gifted woman, and, as far as any woman can, filled a mother's place to the children. She liked the home she came to from the first, and relates that Harriet, with her instinctive love of justice ignorantly aflame, said to her: "Because you have come and married my father, when I am big enough I mean to go and marry your father!"

  But for all the quaint child's threat, she admired and loved the beautiful young stepmother heartily, who in turn speaks of her as "amiable, lovely, affectionate and bright, as ever I saw."

  Catherine, the oldest sister, herself afterward a distinguished and excellent woman, records how Harriet, not yet seven years old,—"is a very good girl. She has been to school all this summer, and has learned to read very fluently. She has committed to memory twenty-seven hymns and two long

  Yet this forward scholar was also a hearty, rosy, strong girl; with flying curls of sunny brown, and sweet, keen, blue-gray eyes; ready for fun and play; a happy, childish creature, "quite pretty," rejoicing in this life, yet weighted to some extent with the prospects of the life which is to come,—never ignored or neglected in that hill-top parsonage.

  We hear of her a year or two later, begging for an epithet "for the grave of her beloved cat; and discern the germ of that humane spirit that in her womanhood loved and recorded the lives and doings of so many of these "spirits in prison," from "Mr. Black Trip," to "Hum the Son of Buz."

  Litchfield was then the very place for a child like Harriet Beecher to develop in. The Wolcotts, Judge Gould, John Allen, Jabez Huntington, Uriel Holmes, Seth P. Beers, Dr. Sheldon, John P. Brace, Judge Tapping Reeve, Mrs. Sarah Pierce, the Tallmadges, and the Champions are all names that in Connecticut were synonymous with learning, intellect, and high character. On this isolated hill clustered a society of the most cultivated kind, and the minister's family, ex officio, took rank with the highest. Lyman Beecher's household did honor to the rank; from no other house in that wide green street did such fame and worth send out representatives into the world.

  And here, too, was situated the best school in Connecticut. Nominally under the conduct of Mrs. Sarah Pierce, a well-educated and superior woman, its real head and guide was her nephew, John Pierce Brace, a teacher still held in grateful remembrance, and one to whom the writer of this article owes a debt of deep gratitude for the zeal, the patience, and the affection that not only stimulated, but guided and sweetened her continuous school-life.

  No teacher can ever have "educated" his pupils in the true sense of the word better than Mr. Brace: less of a martinet

  "He exceeded all teachers I ever knew in the faculty of teaching composition. In my twelfth year, by two years of constant practice under his training, I had gained so far as to be appointed one of the writers for the annual exhibition. . . . The subject was 'Can the Immortality of the Soul be Proved by the Light of Nature?' . . . I chose to adopt the negative. I remember the scene at that exhibition, to me so eventful. The hall was crowded with all the literati of Litchfield. Before them all our compositions were read aloud. When mine was read, I noticed that father, who was sitting on high beside Mr. Brace, brightened and looked interested, and at the close I heard him say,—

  "'Who wrote that composition?'

  "'Your daughter, sir,' was the answer.

  "It was the proudest moment of my life. There was no mistaking father's face when he was pleased, and to have interested him was past all juvenile triumphs."

  No doubt, long years after, when his teaching days were over, and his heart wrung with loss and disappointment, when the daughter of all his children most like her father lay in an early grave, and life grew dark before him, John P. Brace looked back upon this child of genius, and smiled to think of the wonderful "composition" which she had then

  And here her destiny and duty began to be manifest. "From early childhood I had a passion for wrIllegal HTML character: decimal 128