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Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. By HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. Three Hundred and Tenth Thousand. Boston: John P. Jewett & Co.—Mrs. Stowe, in our judgment, has never surpassed the first
effort that made her famous. "Dred" was a second Uncle Tom, produced with more labor, but flagging towards its close, and
never finished. Her last work is more artistically executed, and has splendid passages, and scenes beautifully drawn. But
Uncle Tom wrote itself. The tender humanity, the searching pathos, the indescribable humor, the power of imagination that gives to sentences and single words the charm of pictures, exist unsurpassed in Uncle Tom, and children go back to it and read it over and over, who never would attempt either of Mrs. Stowe's more elaborate productions. Sam and Andy will live as long even as Dogberry and Verges, and this world will be a better one evermore because Little Nell and Eva have appeared in it, if only as ideals and possibilities. The ghost-story, got up to help off Emmeline and Cassy, is the only thing in the book which seems an interpolation. Uncle Tom marks an era in the history of a great reform. It was one of the most powerful agencies in reversing the pro-slavery current of opinion, and it shows how much stronger is one woman in the right than all the statesmen and politicians in the wrong. The praise of this book in coming history will be that it nullified the Fugitive Slave Bill. S. |