yet not perfectly, so indifferent was he to those attractions of material wealth which are so powerful for his countrymen. Here, possibly, we have the secret of his failure to engage their interest. Hours for the Soul. July 22nd, 1878.-Living down in the country again. A wonderful conjunction of all that goes to make those sometime miracle-hours after sunset-so near and yet so far. Perfect, or nearly perfect days, I notice, are not so very uncommon; but the combinations that make perfect nights are few, even in a lifetime. We have one of those perfections to-night. Sunset left things pretty clear; the larger stars were visible soon as the shades allow'd. A while after eight, three or four great black clouds suddenly rose, seemingly from different points, and sweeping with broad swirls of wind but no thunder, underspread the orbs from view everywhere, and indicated a violent heat-storm. But without storm, clouds, blackness and all, sped and vanish'd as suddenly as they had risen; and from a little after nine till eleven the atmosphere and the whole show above were in that state of exceptional clearness and glory just alluded to. In the north-west turned the Great Dipper with its pointers round the Cynosure. A little south of east the constellation of the Scorpion was fully up, with red Antares glowing in its neck; while dominating, majestic Jupiter swam, an hour and a half risen, in the east-(no moon till after eleven). A large part of the sky seem'd just laid in great splashes of phosphorus. You could look deeper in, farther through, than usual; the orbs thick as heads of wheat in a field. Not that there was any special brilliancy either-nothing near as sharp as I have seen of keen winter nights, but a curious general luminousness throughout to sight, sense, and soul. The latter had much to do with it. (I am convinced there are hours of Nature, especially of the atmosphere, mornings and evenings, address'd to the soul. Night transcends, for that purpose, what the proudest day can do.) Now, indeed, if never before, the heavens declared the glory of God. It was to the full the sky of the Bible, of Arabia, of the prophets, and of the oldest poems. There, in abstraction and stillness (I had gone off by myself to absorb the scene, to have the spell unbroken), the copiousness, the removedness, vitality, loose-clear-crowdedness, of that stellar concave spreading overhead, softly absorb'd into me, rising so free, interminably high, stretching east, west, north, south-and I, though but a point in the centre below, embodying all. As if for the first time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and through me its placid and untellable lesson, beyond-O, so infinitely beyond-anything from art, books, sermons, or from science, old or new. The spirit's hour-religion's hour-the visible suggestion of God in space and time-now once definitely indicated, if never again. The untold pointed at-the heavens all paved with it. The Milky Way, as if some superhuman symphony, some ode of universal vagueness, disdaining syllable and sound-a flashing glance of Deity, address'd to the soul. All silently-the indescribable night and stars-far off and silently. (From Specimen Days.) Boston Common-More of Emerson. Oct. 10-13.-I spend a good deal of time on the Common, these delicious days and nights-every midday from 11.30 to about 1-and almost every sunset another hour. I know all the big trees, especially the old elms along Tremont and Beacon Streets, and have come to a sociable-silent understanding with most of them in the sunlit air (yet crispy-cool enough), as I saunter along the wide unpaved walks. Up and down this breadth by Beacon Street, between these same old elms, I walk'd for two hours, of a bright sharp February midday twenty-one years ago, with Emerson, then in his prime, keen, physically and morally magnetic, arm'd at every point, and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual. During those two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was an argumentstatement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry) of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, 'Children of Adam.' More precious than gold to me that dissertation-it afforded me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point of E.'s statement was unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put -and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. What have you to say then to such things?' said E., pausing in conclusion. Only that, while I can't answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify it,' was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the American House. And thenceforward I never waver'd or was touch'd with qualms (as I confess I had been two or three times before). I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain❜d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. So they show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession. The City Dead-House. By the city dead-house by the gate, As idly sauntering wending my way from the clangour, I curious pause, for lo, an outcast form, a poor dead prostitute brought, Her corpse they deposit unclaim'd, it lies on the damp brick pavement, The divine woman, her body, I see the body, I look on it alone, That house once full of passion and beauty, all else I notice not, Nor stillness so cold, nor running water from faucet, nor odours morbific impress me, But the house alone-that wondrous house-that delicate fair house-that ruin! That immortal house more than all the rows of dwellings ever built! Or white-domed capitol with majestic figure surmounted, or all the old high-spired cathedrals, That little house alone more than them all-poor, desperate house! Fair, fearful wreck-tenement of a soul-itself a soul, Unclaim'd, avoided house-take one breath from my tremulous lips, Take one tear dropt aside as I go for thought of you, Dead house of love-house of madness and sin, crumbled, crush'd, House of life, erewhile talking and laughing-but ah, poor house, dead even then, Months, years, an echoing, garnish'd house- but dead, dead, dead. Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving? I know not even my own work past or present, And these things I see suddenly, what mean they? The Death of Lincoln. O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up for you the flag is flung-for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths-for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. From 'Passage to India.' Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79), born at Newburyport in Massachusetts, was apprenticed to the printer of a local paper, at seventeen began to write for it, and in 1824 became editor. In 1829 he was joint-editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, published in Baltimore; and when the vigorous expression of his anti-slavery views led to his imprisonment for libel, friends paid his fine. He delivered emancipation lectures in New York and elsewhere, and returning to Boston, in 1831 started the Liberator, a paper which he carried on until slavery was abolished, though at first he suffered personal violence and was constantly threatened with assassination and prosecution. It was he who organised the Anti-Slavery Society. His Sonnets and other Poems (1847) were not his chief claim to remembrance. See Lives by his sons (4 vols. 1885-89; new ed. 1893) and Goldwin Smith (1892). Horace Greeley (1811-72) was born a small farmer's son at Amherst in New Hampshire, entered a printing-office, assisted in editorial work, and in 1834 started the weekly New Yorker, for which he wrote essays, poetry, and miscellaneous articles. In 1841 he founded the New York Tribune-successively Whig, anti-slavery Whig, and extreme Republican—of which he was leading editor till his death. In 1848 he was elected to Congress by a New York district. Before the Civil War he upheld the right of the Southern states to secede; when the war began he strenuously supported it; and after Lee's surrender he warmly advocated a universal amnesty. In 1872 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency. His works include The American Conflict (1864–66), Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), Essays on Political Economy (1870), and What I know of Farming (1871). There are Lives of him by Parton (new ed. 1882), Ingersoll (1873), and Zabriskie (1890). Wendell Phillips (1811-84), born at Boston, Massachusetts, graduated at Harvard in 1831. and was called to the Bar in 1834; but he found himself irresistibly drawn to the real work of his life, and by 1837 was the principal orator of the anti-slavery party. He also championed the causes of temperance and women, and advocated the rights of the Indians. His speeches and letters were collected in 1863 (new ed. 1884). There is a Life by Austin (1888). Thomas Wentworth Higginson, born at Cambridge in Massachusetts in 1823, was ordained to the ministry, from which he retired in 1858. Meanwhile he had been active in the anti-slavery agitation, and, with others, had been indicted for the murder of a man killed during an attempt to rescue a fugitive slave, but had escaped through a flaw in the indictment. In the Civil War he commanded the first regiment raised from among former slaves; in 1880-81 was a member of the Massachusetts legislature. Besides larger and smaller histories of the United States and of England for Americans, some poems, Lives of Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Longfellow, and books about Massachusetts and old Cambridge, his books include Outdoor Papers (1863), Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), Oldport Days (1873), Common-Sense about Women (1881), Hints on Writing and Speechmaking (1887), and Concerning All of Us (1892). Cheerful Yesterdays (1898) was autobiographical; and there was also a book on Contemporaries (1899). His collected works were reprinted in seven volumes in 1900. See Bentzon's Un Américain Représentatif in the Revue des Deux Mondes for 1901 (translated as a book in 1903). Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, 14th June 1811. Her father was Lyman Beecher, a powerful preacher of New England orthodoxy with some personal variations, who in 1826 was called to Boston to check the rising flood of Unitarianism there, and met with some success. Harriet was the sixth of eight children by Roxanna Foote, after whose death Dr Beecher went on marrying and increasing his family. The seventh child of the first marriage was Henry Ward Beecher, the most popular preacher America has produced, mingling much poetry and humour with a profound spirituality, and carrying much farther his father's tentative reforms of the traditional theology. It was a remarkable family, not only for its ultimate size, but for the ability of its members. Harriet and Henry were its most shining lights, and their two hearts had but one beat as children and lifelong, especially in the anti-slavery struggle. The mother, a bright and beautiful spirit, contributed their finer parts. The father found her reading Sir Charles Grandison when he went to woo, and Evelina was another of her early joys. She died when Harriet was hardly four years old. When twelve the poor child wrote an essay on Immortality, and about the same time was as deeply affected by Lord Byron's death as young Tennyson by the same event; but his was grief for the dead poet, hers for the lost soul. During her father's Boston ministry he became aware of her as an individual and not merely one of his many children; and when in 1832 he removed to Cincinnati, Ohio, she joined his caravan. His object was to found the Lane Theological Seminary, hers to assist her sister Catherine in a female academy. She remained in Cincinnati eighteen years, a period of chronic illness and low spirits, poverty, anxiety, and domestic drudgery. Marrying Calvin E. Stowe, a teacher in her father's school, in 1836, she bore six children in swift succession; her husband, meantime, less the supporting oak than the dependent vine. His most brilliant moment was in 1842, when he advised his wife to drop her original middle name (Elizabeth) and go in for literary fame. The next year a volume of her stories was published, but they were not much. For her tract of this period, Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline, she had but to look into her own heart and write. The year 1850 was signalised by her removal to Brunswick, Maine, the seat of Bowdoin College, where Hawthorne and Longfellow had been classmates at an earlier date, and where now her husband was to occupy a professor's chair. The labour of moving and getting settled fell largely to her share; so that she was 'really glad of an excuse to lie in bed'-the birth of her seventh child, with whom in arms, and full of household care, she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1851-52, publishing it in the National Era, a semi-literary and anti-slavery paper issuing from Washington, District of Columbia. She had no clear idea at the start how she was going on or coming out. She expected to finish it in twelve numbers, and it ran through forty-three. The first part written was 'The Death of Uncle Tom,' which came to her as a kind of vision while she was in church. In the course of its appearance in the Era it excited little attention. Nevertheless, a Boston publisher thought there was something in it, and offered to publish it, giving her a half-share of the profits. She declined the offer because her husband was altogether too poor to assume the risk.' The publisher assumed this and gave her 10 per cent. royalty, which brought her $20,000 in the course of six months. The Era had given her $300. The wonderful fortunes of the book are related by Mrs Stowe in the 'Illustrated Edition' of 1879, when there were forty-three English editions in the British Museum and nineteen translations. A literature of imitation, criticism, and counterblast sprang up around the book, above which it easily towered. A little later a circulation of 1,500,000 was reckoned in Great Britain alone, and still it multiplies its readers and editions. More than two hundred copies are (1903) in constant demand in the New York Public Library. Even more remarkable than the external fortunes of the book is the author's lack of intellectual and moral preparation for it and pre-engagement with it. Her first knowledge of slavery on its own ground was in 1833, when she visited a Kentucky plantation, which became Colonel Shelby's in the book. She saw something of pro-slavery riots in Cincinnati, and something of runaway slaves, only the Ohio's width intervening between Cincinnati and slave territory. Once she had a slave-girl as a servant in her house, and when the manhounds were on the girl's track Mrs Stowe's husband and brother spirited her away towards Canada, so furnishing Mrs Stowe with one of her strong incidents. Had her own scent upon the trail of slavery been keen, her opportunities for intimate knowledge of it would have been adequate to her demands. But living for eighteen years next door to slavery, and, as it were, in the first station of the 'underground railroad,' she does not appear to have had any deep interest in the matter during those years. She probably sympathised with her father when, at the dictation of the slaveholding interests, he silenced the discussion of slavery in his school and forced the withdrawal of the anti-slavery students. She disliked the abolitionists and was still a 'colonisationist' when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Apparently she waited, as did many others, for the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) to wake her sleeping heart, and it was first through another's eyes that she saw the horror of the situation. Her brother Edward's wife in Boston had a close view of the slave captures and renditions, and she wrote to Mrs Stowe commanding her to 'write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.' Mrs Stowe read the letter in her little Brunswick parlour, and then crushing it in her hand, as if it were the monster, said, erecting her tired body, 'I will write something. I will, if I live.' No vow was ever kept more sacredly. Once launched upon the tide of her story, she was swept along with passionate sympathy. Much of it was written in the small hours of the night, after the baking, mending, child-nursing, house-painting, and other drudgery of the day. The book written in this fashion had the defects of its qualities. The plot was loose and rambling; the style had ailing spots; the knowledge of Southern life and character and situation had its defective side. But the author had the divine gift of imagination, and her book was all alive. Every character had reality; so had the scenery of the book; so had its main effect. It did not exaggerate the horrors of slavery. It confessed the better side. But that its general truth was not too harsh the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1853, furnished irrefragable proof. It is difficult to estimate the effect of the book on the anti-slavery cause. It has generally been accounted its most powerful instrument. Lincoln said to Mrs Stowe in 1862, 'Are you the little woman that made this great war?' On the other hand, we have to reckon with the fact that the anti-slavery vote fell off nearly one-half in the presidential election of 1852. Shortly the book had 'great allies'-the repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854 and the Kansas conflict following. But, however modified or enhanced, its effect on the great struggle, now rapidly approaching its climax, must have been deep and wide. It helped to liberate the slave; it entirely liberated Mrs Stowe's own genius and in part her spirit. After 1852 she seemed a different woman. In her letters the dignity of great events supplanted her domestic miseries. Her book made her an abolitionist. The grind of poverty was over, while still she must somehow be always scraping her brains for money as if there were still a wolf at the door. In England she was the object of an ovation which would have spoiled a nature less entirely simple than her own. In Dred (1856), a second anti-slavery novel, and in The Minister's Wooing, and especially in Old Town Folks, she attained an artistic excellence denied to her great improvisation. Had Uncle Tom's Cabin rendered Southern life as perfectly as Old Town Folks rendered New England life and character, without loss of lyrical passion, it would have been a greater book. In Dred there was some waking to the perception of the ex-slaveholder, James G. Birney, that the American churches were the bulwark of slavery.' In the Minister's Wooing Mrs Stowe's moral nature was more deeply engaged than in Uncle Tom, for slavery never shook her soul with its enormity as did the doctrine of endless future punishment. Agnes of Sorrento and The Pearl of Orr's Island, agreeable stories, suffered from the exigencies of simultaneous production. To drive her spontaneous soul in publisher's harness was always difficult. She anticipated no permanent reputation for her writings subsequent to Old Town Folks. The closing pericd of her life crowned her with great reverence and affection, while burdening her with domestic sorrow, a fierce attack upon her brother's character, the painful episode of her own attack upon Lord Byron's, and the slow but sure breaking down of her mind some years before her death, which occurred 1st July 1896. Mrs Stowe's works, as published in the 'Riverside Edition' in seventeen volumes, include a Life written by her friend Annie Fields in one volume. This, an excellent book, is also published separately (1898). There is another Life, 'compiled from her journal and letters,' by her son Charles Edward Stowe (1890). It is not well done, but is fuller than Mrs Fields's. JOHN WHITE CHADWICK. Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), Mrs Beecher Stowe's brother (see page 809), graduated at Amherst College, preached for eight years at Indianapolis, and in 1847 became pastor of Plymouth (Congregational) Church in Brooklyn, where, practically ignoring formal creeds, he preached what he held to be the gospel of Christ, contended for temperance, and denounced slavery to an immense congregation. He was a strenuous politician; at the close of the war in 1865 he became an earnest advocate of recon |