Days With Mrs. Stowe

FLORENCE, the city of charms and flowers, was the spot where I first met Mrs. Stowe. She was delighting herself in the fascinations of that lovely place. Not alone every day, but every second as it passed, was full of eager interest to her. She could say with Thoreau, “ I moments live who lived but years.” We had both been invited to a large reception, one evening, in one of the old palaces on the Arno. There were music and dancing, and there were lively groups of ladies and gentlemen strolling from room to room, contrasting somewhat strangely in their gayety with the solemn pictures hanging on the walls, and a sense of shadowy presence which seems to haunt those dusky interiors. A certain discrepancy between the modern company and the surroundings, a weird mingling of the past and the present, made any apparition appear possible, and left room only for a faint thrill of surprise when a voice by my side said, “There is Mrs. Stowe.” In a moment she approached and I was presented to her, and after a brief pause she passed on. All this was natural enough, but a wave of intense disappointment swept over me. Why had I found no words to express or even indicate the feeling that had choked me ? Was the fault mine ? Oh yes, I said to myself, for I could not conceive it to be otherwise, and I looked upon my opportunity, the gift of the gods, as utterly and forever wasted.

I was depressed and sorrowing over the vanishing of a presence I might perhaps never meet again, and no glamour of light, or music, or pictures, or friendly voices could recall any pleasure to my heart. Meanwhile, the unconscious object of all this disturbance was strolling quietly along, leaning on the arm of a friend, hardly ever speaking, followed by a group of traveling-companions, and entirely absorbed in the gay scene around her. She was a small woman, and her pretty curling hair and far-away dreaming eyes, and her way of becoming occupied in what interested her until she forgot everything else for the time, all these I first began to see and understand as I gazed after her retreating figure.

Mrs. Stowe’s personal appearance has received scant justice and no mercy at the hand of the photographer. She says herself, during her triumphal visit to England after the publication of Uncle Tom : “ The general topic of remark on meeting me seems to be that I am not so bad looking as they were afraid I was ; and I do assure you, when I have seen the things that are put up in the shop windows here with my name under them, I have been lost in wondering imagination at the boundless loving-kindness of my English and Scottish friends in keeping up such a warm heart for such a Gorgon. I should think that the Sphinx in the London Museum might have sat for most of them. I am going to make a collection of these portraits to bring home to you. There is a great variety of them, and they will be useful, like the Irishman’s guide-board which showed ‘ where the road did not go.’ ” I remember once accompanying her to a reception at a well-known house in Boston, where, before the evening was over, the hostess drew me aside, saying, “ Why did you never tell me that Mrs. Stowe was beautiful ? ” And indeed, when I observed her in the full ardor of conversation, with her heightened color, her eyes shining and awake, but filled with great softness, her abundant curling hair rippling naturally about her head and falling a little at the sides (as in the portrait by Richmond), I quite agreed with the lady of the house. Nor was that the first time her beauty had been revealed to me, but she was seldom seen to be beautiful by the great world, and the pleasure of this recognition was very great to those who loved her.

She was never afflicted with a personal consciousness of her reputation, nor was she trammeled by it. The sense that a great work had been accomplished through her only made her more humble, and her shy, absent-minded ways were continually throwing her admirers into confusion. Late in life (when her failing powers made it impossible for her to speak as one living in a world which she seemed to have left far behind) she was accosted, I was told, in the garden of her country retreat, in the twilight one evening, by a good old retired sea-captain who was her neighbor for the time. “ When I was younger,” said he respectfully, holding his hat in his hand while he spoke, “ I read with a great deal of satisfaction and instruction Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The story impressed me very much, and I am happy to shake hands with you, Mrs. Stowe, who wrote it.” “ I did not write it,” answered the white-haired old lady gently, as she shook the captain’s hand. You did n’t ? he ejaculated in amazement. “Why, who did, then ? ” “ God wrote it,” she replied simply. “ I merely did his dictation.” “ Amen,” said the captain reverently, as he walked thoughtfully away.

This was the expression in age of what lay at the foundation of her life. She always spoke and behaved as if she recognized herself to be an instrument breathed upon by the Divine Spirit. When we consider how this idea absorbed her to the prejudice of what appeared to others a wholesome exercise of human will and judgment, it is not wonderful that the world was offended when she once made conclusions contrary to the opinion of the public, and thought best to publish them.

Mrs. Stowe was a delightful talker. She loved to gather a small circle of friends around a fireside, when she easily took the lead in fun and story-telling. This was her own ground, and upon it she was not to be outdone. “ Let me put my feet upon the fender,”she would say, “ and I can talk till all is blue.”

It was my good fortune to be in Mrs. Stowe’s company once in Rome when she came unexpectedly face to face with an exhibition of the general feeling of reverence and gratitude towards herself. We had gone together to the rooms of the brothers Castellani, the world-famous workers in gold. The collection of antique gems and the beautiful reproductions of them were new to us. Mrs. Stowe was full of enthusiasm, and we lingered long over the wonderful things which the brothers brought forward to show. Among them was the head of an Egyptian slave carved in black onyx. It was an admirable work of art, and while we were enjoying it one of them said to Mrs. Stowe, “ Madam, we know what you have been to the poor slave. We are ourselves but poor slaves still in Italy : you feel for us ; will you keep this gem as a slight recognition of what you have done ? ” She took the jewel in silence, but when we looked for some response, her eyes were filled with tears and it was impossible for her to speak.

When the hours of her European playday grew near the end, she began to lay plans for returning home in the steamer with those who had become dear to her, and in one of her notes of that period she wrote to me : “ On the strength of having heard that you were going home in the Europa June 16, we also have engaged passage therein for that time, and hope that we shall not be disappointed. . . . It must be true; we can’t have it otherwise. . . . Our southern Italy trip was a glory — it was a rose — it was a nightingale — all, in short, that one ever dreams ; but alas ! it is over.”

It was a delightful voyage in every sense; and at that period a voyage was no little matter of six days, but a good fourteen days of sitting together on deck in pleasant summer weather, and having time enough and to spare. Hawthorne and his family also concluded to join the party. Mrs. Hawthorne, who was always the romancer in conversation, filled the evening hours by weaving magic webs of her fancies, until we looked upon her as a second Scheherazade, and the day the head was to be cut off was the day we should come to shore. “ Oh,” said Hawthorne, “ I wish we might never get there.” But the good ship moved steadily as fate. Meanwhile, Mrs. Stowe often took her turn at entertaining the little group. She was seldom tired of relating stories of New England life and her early experiences.

When the ship came to shore, Mrs. Stowe and her daughters went at once to Andover, where Professor Stowe had remained at his post during their long absence in Europe. She went also with equal directness to her writing-desk, and though there are seldom any dates upon her letters, the following note must have been written shortly after her return : —

“MY DEAR MR. FIELDS, —Agnes of Sorrento was conceived on the spot, — a spontaneous tribute to the exceeding loveliness and beauty of all things there.

“ One bright evening, as I was entering the old gateway, I saw a beautiful young girl sitting in its shadow selling oranges. She was my Agnes. Walking that same evening through the sombre depths of the gorge, I met ‘ Old Elsie,’ walking erect and tall, with her piercing black eyes, Roman nose, and silver hair, — walking with determination in every step, and spinning like one of the Fates glittering silver flax from a distaff she carried in her hands.

“ A few days after, our party being weather-bound at Salerno had resort to all our talents to pass the time, and songs and stories were the fashion of the day. The first chapter was my contribution to that entertainment. The story was voted into existence by the voices of all that party, and by none more enthusiastically than by one young voice which will never be heard on earth more. It was kept in mind and expanded and narrated as we went on to Rome over a track that the pilgrim Agnes is to travel. To me, therefore, it is fragrant with love of Italy and memory of some of the brightest hours of life.

“ I wanted to write something of this kind as an author’s introduction to the public. Could you contrive to print it on a fly-leaf, if I get it ready, and put a little sort of dedicatory poem at the end of it ? I shall do this at least in the book, if not now.”

In the autumn of 1862 a plan for leaving Andover altogether was finally matured. She wrote : “ You have heard that we are going to Hartford to live, and I am now in all the bustle of houseplanning, to say nothing of grading, underdraining, and setting out trees around our future home. It is four acres and a half of lovely woodland on the banks of a river, and yet within an easy walk of Hartford, —in fact in the city limits; and when our house is done, you and yours must come and see us. I would rather have made the change in less troublous times, but the duties here draw so hardly on Mr. Stowe’s strength that I thought it better to live on less and be in a place of our own, and with no responsibilities except those of common gentlefolk.”

The war, the enlistment of her second son, the eldest having already died, filled her heart and mind afresh with new problems and anxieties. She wrote the following hurried note from Hartford in 1862, which gives some idea of her occupations and frame of mind : “ I am going to Washington to see the heads of departments myself, and to satisfy myself that I may refer to the Emancipation Proclamation as a reality and a substance, not to fizzle out at the little end of the horn, as I should be sorry to call the attention of my sisters in Europe to any such impotent conclusion. . . . I mean to have a talk with ‘ Father Abraham ‘ himself, among others.”

Mrs. Stowe lost no time, but proceeded to carry out her plan as soon as practicable. Of this visit to Washington she says little in her letters beyond the following meagre words: “It seems to be the opinion here not only that the President will stand up to his proclamation, but that the Border States will accede to his proposition for emancipation. I have noted the thing as a glorious expectancy !

. . . To-day to the home of the contrabands, seeing about five hundred poor fugitives eating a comfortable Thanksgiving dinner, and singing, ‘ Oh, let my people go ! ’ It was a strange and moving sight.”

It was left for others to speak of her interview with President Lincoln. Her daughter was told that when the President heard her name he seized her hand, saying, “ Is this the little woman who made the great war ? ” He then led her apart to a seat in the window, where they were withdrawn and undisturbed by other guests. No one but those two souls will ever know what waves of thought and feeling swept over them in that brief hour.

Afterwards she heard these words pronounced in the Senate Chamber in the Message of President Lincoln ; it was in the darkest hour of the war, Mrs. Stowe wrote, when defeat and discouragement had followed the Union armies and all hearts were trembling with fear : “If this struggle is to he prolonged till there be not a home in the land where there is not one dead, till all the treasure amassed by the unpaid labor of the slave shall be wasted, till every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be atoned by blood drawn by the sword, we can only bow and say, ‘ Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints ! ’ ”

The following year was made memorable in Mrs. Stowe’s life by the marriage of her youngest daughter. Again I find that no description can begin to give as clearly as the glimpses in her own letters the multifarious responsibilities which beset her. She says : “ I am in trouble, — have been in trouble ever since my turtle-doves announced their intention of pairing in June instead of August, because it entailed on me an immediate necessity of bringing everything out of doors and in to a state of completeness for the wedding exhibition in June. The garden must be planted, the lawn graded, harrowed, rolled, seeded, and the grass up and growing, stumps got out and stumps and trees got in, conservatory made over, belts planted, holes filled, — and all by three very slippery sort of Irishmen who had rather any time be minding their own business than mine. I have back doorsteps to be made, and troughs, screens, and whatnot ; papering, painting, and varnishing, hitherto neglected, to be completed ; also spring house-cleaning ; also dressmaking for one bride and three ordinary females ; also — and — and —’s wardrobes to be overlooked; also carpets to be made and put down ; also a revolution in the kitchen cabinet, threatening for a time to blow up the whole establishment altogether.” And so the letter proceeds with two more sheets, adding near the end: “ I send you to-day a ‘ Chimney Corner ’ on Our Martyrs, which I have written out of the fullness of my heart. . . . It is an account of the martyrdom of a Christian boy of our own town of Andover, who died of starvation and want in a Southern prison on last Christmas Day.”

With her heroic nature she was always ready to lead the forlorn hope. The child no one else was willing to provide for, the woman the world despised, were brought into her home and cared for as her own. Unhappily, her delicate health at this time (though she was naturally strong), her constant literary labors, her uncertain income, her private griefs, all united, caused her to fall short in ability to accomplish what she undertook : hence there were often crises from sudden illness and non-fulfillment of engagements which were very serious in their effects, but the elasticity of her spirits was something marvelous and carried her over many a hard place.

In the autumn of 1864 she wrote : “ I feel I need to write in these days, to keep from thinking of things that make me dizzy and blind, and fill my eyes with tears so that I cannot see the paper. I mean such things as are being done where our heroes are dying as Shaw died. It is not wise that all our literature should run in a rut cut through our hearts and red with our blood. I feel the need of a little gentle household merriment and talk of common things, to indulge which I have devised the following.”

Notwithstanding her view of the need and her skillfully devised plans to meet it, she soon sent another epistle, showing how impossible it was to stem the current of her thought: —

November 29, 1864.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — I have sent my New Year’s article, the result of one of those peculiar experiences which sometimes occur to us writers. I had planned an article, gay, sprightly, wholly domestic ; but as I began and sketched the pleasant home and quiet fireside, an irresistible impulse wrote for me what followed, — an offering of sympathy to the suffering and agonized whose homes have forever been darkened. Many causes united at once to force on me this vision, from which generally I shrink, but which sometimes will not be denied, — will make itself felt.

Just before I went to New York two of my earliest and most intimate friends lost their oldest sons, captains and majors, — splendid fellows physically and morally, beautiful, brave, religious, uniting the courage of soldiers to the faith of martyrs, — and when I went to Brooklyn it seemed as if I were hearing some such thing almost every day ; and Henry, in his profession as minister, has so many letters full of imploring anguish, the cry of hearts breaking that ask help of him. . . .

It was during one of Mrs. Stowes visits to Boston in the ensuing year that she chanced to talk with greater fullness and openness than she had done with us before on the subject of Spiritualism. In the simplest way she affirmed her entire belief in manifestations of the nearness and individual life of the unseen, and gave vivid illustrations of the reasons why her faith was thus assured. She never sought after such testimony, so far as I am aware, unless it may have been to sit with others who were interested, but her conclusions were definite and unvarying. At that period such a declaration of faith required a good deal of bravery; now the subject has assumed a different phase, and there are few thinking people who do not recognize a certain truth hidden within the shadows. She spoke with tender seriousness of “ spiritual manifestations ” as recorded in the New Testament and in the prophets. From his early youth her husband had possessed the peculiar power of seeing persons about him who could not be perceived by others ; visions so distinct that it was impossible for him to distinguish at times between the real and the unreal. I recall one illustration which had occurred only a few years previous to their departure from Andover. She had been called to Boston one day on business. Making her preparations hurriedly, she bade the household farewell, and rushed to the station, only to see the train go out as she arrived. There was nothing to do but to return home and wait patiently for the next train ; but wishing not to be disturbed, she quietly opened a side door and crept noiselessly up the staircase leading to her own room, sitting down by her writing-table in the window. She had been seated about half an hour when Professor Stowe came in, looked about him with a preoccupied air, but did not speak to her. She thought his behavior strange, and amused herself by watching him; at last the situation became so extraordinary that she began to laugh. “ Why,” he exclaimed, with a most astonished air, “ is that you ? I thought it was one of my visions ! ”

It may seem a singular antithesis to say of the writer of one of the greatest stories the world has yet produced that she has not been a student of literature. Books as a medium of the ideas of the age, and as the promulgators of morals and religion, were of course like the breath of her life ; but a study of the literature of the past as the only true foundation for a literature of the present was outside the pale of her occupations, and for the larger portion of her life outside of her interest. During the riper season of her activity with the pen, the necessity of studying style and the thoughts of others gained a larger hold upon her mind ; but she always said, with a twinkle of amusement and pride, that she never could have done anything without Mr. Stowe. He knew everything, and all she had to do was to go to him. Of her great work she has written, in that noble introduction to the illustrated edition of Uncle Tom : “ The story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her. . . . The book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial.”

It is easily seen that it was neither a spirit of depreciation of knowledge nor lack of power to become a student which made her fail to obtain adjuncts indispensable to great writers, but her feet were led in other paths and her strength was needed for other ends. Madame George Sand said, writing of Uncle Tom soon after its publication : “ If its judges, possessed with the love of what they call ‘ artistic work,’ find unskillful treatment in the book, look well at them to see if their eyes are dry when they are reading this or that chapter. ... I cannot say that Mrs. Stowe has talent, as one understands it in the world of letters, but she has genius, as humanity feels the need of genius, —the genius of goodness, not that of the rules of letters, but of the saint.”

At this period, as she had an accessible home in the pleasant city of Hartford, strangers and travelers often sought and found her. In one of her familiar notes of 1867 she wrote : “ The Amberleys have written that they are coming to us to-morrow, and of all times, accordingly, our furnace must spring a leak. We are hoping to make all right before they get here, but I am really ashamed to show such weather at this time of year. Poor America! It’s like having your mother expose herself by a fit, of ill temper before strangers. . . . Do, I beg, write to a poor sinner laboring under a book.” And again, a little later : “ The book is almost done — hang it! but done well, and will be a good thing for young men to read, and young women too, and so I ’ll send you one. You ’ll find some things in it, I fancy, that I know and you don’t, about the times before you were born, when I was ‘ Hush, hush, my dear-ing’ in Cincinnati. . . . I smell spring afar off — sniff — do you ? Any smell of violets in the distance ? I think it comes over the water from the Pamfili Doria.”

A new era opened in Mrs. Stowe’s life when she made her first visit to Florida, in the winter of 1867. She was tired and benumbed with care and cold. Suddenly the thought came to her that she would go to the South, herself, and see what the stories were worth which she was constantly hearing about its condition. In the mean time, if she could, she would enjoy the soft air, and find retirement in which she might continue her book. She says in one of her letters : —

“ Winter weather and cold seem always a kind of nightmare to me. I am going to take my writing-desk and go down to Florida to F—’s plantation, where we have now a home, and abide there until the heroic agony of betweenity, the freeze and thaw of winter, is over, and then I doubt not I can write my three hours a day. Meanwhile, I have a pretty good pile of manuscript. . . . The letters I have got about blossoming roses and loungers in linen coats, while we have been frozen and snowed up, have made my very soul long to be away. Cold weather really seems to torpify my brain. I write with a heavy numbness. I have not yet had a good spell of writing, though I have had all through the story abundant clairvoyance, and see just how it must be written ; but for writing some parts I want warm weather, and not to be in the state of a ‘ froze and thawed apple.’ . . . The cold affects me precisely as extreme hot weather used to in Cincinnati, — gives me a sort of bilious neuralgia. I hope to get a clear, bright month in Florida, when I can say something to purpose.

“I did want to read some of my story to you before I went. I have read it to my husband, and though one may think a husband a partial judge, yet mine is so nervous and so afraid of being bored that I feel as if it were something to hold him; and he likes it,— is quite wakeful, so to speak, about it. All I want now, to go on, is a good frame, as father used to say about his preaching. I want calm, soft, even dreamy, enjoyable weather, sunshine and flowers.

Love to dear A—, whom I so much want to see once more.”

Unhappily, she could not get away so soon as she desired. There were contracts to be signed and other businesses to arrange. These delays made her visit southward much shorter than she intended, but it proved to be only the introduction, the first brief chapter as it were, of her future winter life in Florida. Before leaving she wrote as follows to her publisher : —

“ I am so constituted that it is absolutely fatal to me to agree to have any literary work done at certain dates. I mean to have this story done by the 1st of September. It would be greatly for my pecuniary interest to get it done before that, because I have the offer of eight thousand dollars for the newspaper use of the story I am planning to write after it. But I am bound by the laws of art. Sermons, essays, lives of distinguished people, I can write to order at times and seasons. A story comes, grows like a flower, sometimes will and sometimes won’t, like a pretty woman. When the spirits will help, I can write. When they jeer, flout, make faces, and otherwise maltreat me, I can only wait humbly at their gates, watch at the posts of their doors.

“This story grows even when I do not write. I spent a month in the mountains in Stockbridge composing before I wrote a word.

“ I only ask now a good physical condition, and I go to warmer climes hoping to save time there. I put everything and everybody off that interferes with this, except Pussy Willow, which will be a pretty story for a child’s ‘ series.’ ”

At last she sailed away, about the 1st of March, 1867, and with that delightful power of knowing what she wanted, and being content when she attained her end, which is too rare, alas! Her letters glowed and blossomed and shone with the fruit and flowers and sunshine of the South. It was hardly to be expected that her literary work could actually reach the printers’ hands under these circumstances as rapidly as if she had been able to write at home : therefore it was with no sense of surprise that we received from her, during the summer of 1868, what proved to be a chapter of excuses instead of a chapter of her book :

“ I have a long story to tell you of what has prevented my going on with my story, which you must see would so occupy all the nerve and brain force I have that I have not been able to write a word except to my own children. To them in their needs I must write chapters which would otherwise go into my novel.”

About this period she found herself able to come again to Boston for a few days’ visit. There were often long croonings over the fire far into the night; her other - worldliness and abstractions brought with them a dreamy quietude, especially to those whose harried lives kept them only too much awake. Her coining was always a pleasure, for she made holidays by her own delightful presence, and she asked nothing more than what she found in the companionship of her friends.

The visits to Florida had now become necessary to her health, and before long she perceived that to pass the entire winter there, and to surrender her large house in Hartford, was the next step for her to take. She wrote from Florida: “ I am leaving the land of flowers on the 1st of June with tears in my eyes, but having a house in Hartford, it must be lived in. I wish you and — would just come to see it. You have no idea what a lovely place it has grown to be, and I am trying to sell it as hard as a snake to crawl out of his skin. Thus on, till reason is pushed out of life. There ’s no earthly sense in having anything, — lordy massy, no! By the bye, I must delay sending you the ghost in the Captain Brown House till I can go to Natick and make a personal inspection of the premises and give it to you hot.”

Her busy brain was again at work with new plans for future books and articles for magazines. “ Gladly would I fly to you on the wings of the wind,” she says, “ but I am a slave, a bound thrall to work, and I cannot work and play at the same time. After this year I hope to have a little rest, and above all things I won’t be hampered with a serial to write.

. . . We have sold out in Hartford.”

All this routine of labor was to have a new form of interruption, which gave her intense joy. “ I am doing just what you say,” she wrote, “ being first lady-inwaiting on his new majesty. He is very pretty, very gracious and good, and his little mamma and he are a pair. . . . I am getting to be an old fool of a grandma, and to think there is no bliss under heaven to compare with a baby.” Later she wrote on the same subject: “ You ought to see my baby. I have discovered a way to end the woman controversy. Let the women all say that they won’t take care of the babies till the laws are altered. One week of this discipline would bring all the men on their marrow-bones. Only tell us what you want, they would Say, and we will do it. Of course you may imagine me trailing after our little king, — first granny-inwaiting.”

In the summer of 1869 there was a pleasant home at St. John’s Wood, in London, which possessed peculiar attractions. Other houses were as comfortable to look at, other hedges were as green, other drawing-rooms were gayer, but this was the home of George Eliot, and on Sunday afternoons the resort of those who desired the best that London had to give. Here it was that George Eliot told us of her admiration and deep regard, her affection, for Mrs. Stowe. Her reverence and love were expressed with such tremulous sincerity that the speaker won our hearts by her love for our friend. Many letters had already passed between Mrs. Stowe and herself, and she confided to us her amusement at a fancy Mrs. Stowe had taken that Casaubon, in Middlemarch, was drawn from the character of Mr. Lewes. Mrs. Stowe took it so entirely for granted in her letters that it was impossible to dispossess her mind of the illusion. Evidently it was the source of much harmless household amusement at St. John’s Wood. I find in Mrs. Stowe’s letters some pleasant allusions to this correspondence. She writes : “ We were all full of George Eliot when your note came, as I had received a beautiful letter from her in answer to one I wrote from Florida. She is a noble, true woman, and if anybody does n’t see it, so much the worse for them, and not her.” In a note written about that time Mrs. Stowe says she is coming to Boston, and will bring George Eliot’s letters with her that we may read them together ; but that pleasant plan was only one of the imagination, and was never carried out. Her own letter to Mrs. Lewes, written from Florida in March, 1876, may be considered one of the most beautiful and interesting pieces of writing she ever achieved.

This friendship was one that greatly enlisted Mrs. Stowe’s sympathies and enriched her life. Her interest in any woman who was supporting herself, and especially in any one who found a daily taskmaster in the pen, and above all when, as in this case, the woman was one possessed of great moral aspiration half paralyzed in its action by finding itself in an anomalous and (to the world in general) utterly incomprehensible position, made such a woman like a magnet to Mrs. Stowe. She inherited from her father a faith in the divine power of sympathy, which only waxed greater with years and experience. Wherever she found a fellow mortal suffering trouble or dishonor, in spite of hindrance her feet were turned that way. The genius of George Eliot and the contrasting elements of her life and character drew Mrs. Stowe to her side in sisterly solicitude. Her attitude, her sweetness, her sincerity, could not fail to win the heart of George Eliot. They became loving friends.

It was the same inborn sense of fraternity which led her, when a child, on hearing of the death of Lord Byron, to go out into the fields and fling herself, weeping, on the mounded hay, where she might pray alone for his forgiveness and salvation. It is wonderful to observe the influence of Byron upon that generation. It is on record that when Tennyson, a boy of fifteen, heard some one say, “ Byron is dead,” he thought the whole world at an end. I thought,” he said one day, “ everything was over and finished for every one; that nothing else mattered. I remember that I went out alone and carved ‘ Byron is dead ’ into the sandstone.”

From this time forward Mrs. Stowe was chiefly bound up in her life and labors at the South. In 1870, speaking of some literary work she was proposing to herself, she said: “ I am writing as a pure recreative movement of mind, to divert myself from the stormy, unrestful present. . . . I am being châtelaine of a Florida farm. I have on my mind the creation of a town on the banks of the St. John. The three years since we came this side of the river have called into life and growth a thousand peachtrees, a thousand orange-trees, about five hundred lemons, and seven or eight hundred grapevines. A peach orchard, a vineyard, a lemon grove, will carry my name to posterity. I am founding a place which, thirty or forty years hence, will be called the old Stowe place. ... You can have no idea of this queer country, this sort of strange, sandy, half-tropical dreamland, unless you come to it. Here I sit with open windows, the orange buds just opening and filling the air with sweetness, the hens drowsily cackling, the men planting in the field, and callas and wild roses blossoming out of doors. We keep a little fire morning and night. We are flooded with birds ; and by the bye, it is St. Valentine’s Day. . . . I think a uniform edition of Dr. Holmes’s works would be a good thing, Next to Hawthorne he is our most exquisite writer, and in many passages he goes far beyond him. What is the dear Doctor doing ? If you know any book good to inspire dreams and visions, put it into my box. My husband chews endlessly a German cud. I must have English. Has the French book on Spiritualism come yet? If it has, put it in. . . . I wish I could give you a plateful of our oranges.

. . . We had seventy-five thousand of these same on our trees this year, and if you will start off quick, they are not all picked yet. Florida wants one thing. — grass. If it had grass, it would be paradise. But nobody knows what grass is till they try to do without it.”

Three months later she wrote : “I hate to leave my calm isle of Patmos, where the world is not, and I have such quiet long hours for writing. Emerson could insulate himself here and keep his electricity. Hawthorne ought to have lived in an orange grove in Florida. . . . You have no idea how small you all look, you folks in the world, from this distance. All your fusses and your fumings, your red-hot hurrying newspapers, your clamor of rival magazines, — why, we see it as we see steamboats fifteen miles off, a mere speck and smoke.”

It was a strange contrast, and one at variance with her natural taste, which brought her before the public as a reader of her own stories in the autumn and winter of 1872-73. She was no longer able to venture on the effort of a long story, and yet it was manifestly unwise for her to forego the income which was extended to her through this channel. She wrote: “ I have had a very urgent business letter, saying that the lyceums of different towns were making up their engagements, and that if I were going into it I must make my engagements now. It seems to me that I cannot do this. The thing will depend so much on my health and ability to do. You know I could not go round in cold weather. . . .

I feel entirely uncertain, and, as the Yankees say, ‘ did n’t know what to do nor to don’t.’ My state in regard to it may be described by the phrase ‘ Kind o’ love to — hate to —wish I didn’t —want ter.’ I suppose the result will be I shall not work into their lecture system.”

In April she wrote from Mandarin: “ I am painting a Magnolia grandiflora, which I will show you. . . . I am appalled by finding myself booked to read. But I am getting well and strong, and trust to be equal to the emergency. But I shrink from Tremont Temple, and — does not think I can fill it. On the whole, I should like to begin in Boston.” And in August she said : “ I am to begin in Boston in September. ... It seems to me that is a little too early for Boston, is n’t it ? Will there be anybody in town then ? I don’t know as it’s my business, which is simply to speak my piece and take my money.”

Her first reading actually took place in Springfield, not Boston, and the next day she unexpectedly arrived at our cottage at Manchester-by-the-Sea. She had read the previous evening in a large public hall, had risen at five o’clock that morning and found her way to us. Her next readings were given in Boston, the first in the afternoon, at the Tremont Temple. She was conscious that her effort at Springfield had not been altogether successful, — she had not held her large audience ; and she was determined to put the whole force of her nature into this afternoon reading at the Tremont Temple. She called me into her bedroom, where she stood before the mirror, with her short gray hair, which usually lay in soft curls around her brow, brushed erect and standing stiffly. “Look here, my dear,” she said : “ now I am exactly like my father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, when he was going to preach,” and she held up her forefinger warningly. It was easy to see that the spirit of the old preacher was revived in her veins, and the afternoon would show something of his power. An hour later, when I sat with her in the anteroom waiting for the moment of her appearance to arrive, I could feel the power surging up within her. I knew she was armed for a good fight.

That reading was a great success. She was alive in every fibre of her being: she was to read portions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to men, women, and children who could hardly understand the crisis which inspired it, and she determined to effect the difficult task of making them feel as well as hear. With her presence and inspiration they could not fail to understand what her words had signified to the generation that had passed through the struggle of our war. When her voice was not sufficient to make the audience hear, men and women rose from their seats and crowded round her, standing gladly, that no word might be lost. It was the last leap of the flame which had burned out a great wrong. From this period, although she continued to write, she lived chiefly in the retirement of the Florida orange grove, which she always enjoyed. Her sympathy was strong with the new impetus benevolent work in cities had received, and she helped it from her “ grotto ” in more ways than one. Sometimes she would write soothing or inspiriting letters, as the case might demand, to individuals.

Meanwhile, the comfort she drew in from the beauty of nature and the calm around her seemed yearly to nourish and renew her power of existence. Questions which were difficult to others were often solved to her mind by practical observation. It amused her to hear persons agitating the question as to where they should look to supply labor for the South. “ Why,” she remarked once, “ there was a negro, one of those fearfully hot days in the spring, who was digging muck from a swamp just in front of our house, and carrying it in a wheelbarrow up a steep slope, where he dumped it down, and then went back for more. He kept this up when it was so hot that we thought either one of us would die to be five minutes in the sun. We carried a thermometer to the spot where he was working, to see how great the heat was, and it rose at once to one hundred and thirty-five degrees. The man, however, kept cheerfully at his work, and when he went to his dinner sat with the other negroes out in the white sand without a bit of shade. Afterward they all lay down for a nap in the same sheltered locality. Toward evening, when the sun was sufficiently low to enable me to go out, I went to speak to this man. ‘ Martin,’ said I, ‘ you’ve had a warm day’s work. How do you stand it ? Why, I could n’t endure such heat for five minutes.’

‘ Hah ! hah ! No, I s’pose you could n’t. Ladies can’t, missus.’ ‘ But, Martin, are n’t you very tired ? ’ ‘ Bress your heart, no, missus.’ So Martin goes home to his supper, and after supper will be found dancing all the evening on the wharf near by ! After this, when people talk of bringing Germans and Swedes to do such work, I am much entertained.”

Many were the pleasant descriptions of her home sent forth to tempt her friends away from the busy North. “ Here is where we read books,” she said in one of her letters, written in the month of March. “ Up North nobody does, — they don’t have time; so if — will mail his book to Mandarin, I will ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.’ We are having a carnival of flowers. I hope you read my Palmetto Leaves, for then you will see all about us. . . . Our home is like a martin-box. . . . I cannot tell you the quaint odd peace we have here in living under the oak. ‘ Behold she dwelleth under the oak at Mamre.’ All that we want is friends, to whom we may say that solitude is sweet. We have some neighbors, however, who have made pretty places near us. Mr. Stowe keeps up a German class of three young ladies, with whom he is reading Faust for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time, and in the evening I read aloud to a small party of the neighbors. We have made up our home as we went along, throwing out a chamber here and there, like twigs out of the old oak. . . . The orange blossoms have come like showers of pearl, and the yellow jessamine like golden fleeces, and the violets and the lilies, and azaleas. This glorious, budding, blossoming spring, and we have days when merely to breathe and be is to be blessed. I love to have a day of mere existence. Life itself is a pleasure when the sun shines warm, and the lizards dart from all the shingles of the roof, and the birds sing in so many notes and tones the yard reverberates ; and I sit and dream and am happy, and never want to go back North, nor do anything with the toiling, snarling world again. I do wish I could gather you both in my little nest.”

She is like her father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, in many things. The scorching fire of the brain seemed to devour its essence, and she has endured, as he did before her, some years of existence when the motive power of the brain has almost ceased to act. She has become “ like a little child,” wandering about, pleased with flowers, fresh air, the sound of a piano, or a voice singing hymns, but the busy, inspiring spirit is asleep.

Gradually she is fading away, shrouded in this strange mystery, hovered over by the untiring affection of her children, sweet and tender in her decadence, but “ absent.”

At the moment when this brief memorial was receiving a final revision before going to the press, the news reached me of the unloosing of the last threads of consciousness which bound Mrs. Stowe to this world.

A great spirit has performed its mission and has been released. The world moves on unconscious; but the world’s children have been blessed by her coming, and they who know and understand should praise God reverently in her going. “ As a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves : so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof.”

“ My sword shall be bathed in heaven.”

Annie Fields.