Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “This afternoon, as we were traveling, we struck up and sang ‘Jubilee.’ It put me in mind of the time when we used to ride along the rough North Guilford roads and make the air vocal as we went along. Pleasant times those. Those were blue skies, and that was a beautiful lake and noble pine-trees and rocks they were that hung over it. But those we shall look upon ‘na mair.’

  “Well, my dear, there is a land where we shall not love and leave. Those skies shall never cease to shine, the waters of life we shall never be called upon to leave. We have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come. In such thoughts as these I desire ever to rest, and with such words as these let us ‘comfort one another and edify one another.’

  “Harrisburg, Sunday evening. Mother, Aunt Esther, George, and the little folks have just gathered into Kate’s room, and we have just been singing. Father has gone to preach for Mr. De Witt. To-morrow we expect to travel sixty-two miles, and in two more days shall reach Wheeling; there we shall take the steamboat to Cincinnati.”

  On the same journey George Beecher writes: —

  “We had poor horses in crossing the mountains. Our average rate for the last four days to Wheeling was forty-four miles. The journey, which takes the mail-stage forty-eight hours, took us eight days. At Wheeling we deliberated long whether to go on board a boat for Cincinnati, but the prevalence of the cholera there at last decided us to remain. While at Wheeling father preached eleven times, — nearly every evening, — and gave them the Taylorite heresy on sin and decrees to the highest notch; and what amused me most was to hear him establish it from the Confession of Faith. It went high and dry, however, above all objections, and they were delighted with it, even the old school men, since it had not been christened ‘heresy’ in their hearing. After remaining in Wheeling eight days, we chartered a stage for Cincinnati, and started next morning.

  “At Granville, Ohio, we were invited to stop and attend a protracted meeting. Being in no great hurry to enter Cincinnati till the cholera had left, we consented. We spent the remainder of the week there, and I preached five times and father four. The interest was increasingly deep and solemn each day, and when we left there were forty-five cases of conversion in the town, besides those from the surrounding towns. The people were astonished at the doctrine; said they never saw the truth so plain in their lives.”

  Although the new-comers were cordially welcomed in Cincinnati, and everything possible was done for their comfort and to make them feel at home, they felt themselves to be strangers in a strange land. Their homesickness and yearnings for New England are set forth by the following extracts from Mrs. Stowe’s answer to the first letter they received from Hartford after leaving there: —

  My dear Sister (Mary), — The Hartford letter from all and sundry has just arrived, and after cutting all manner of capers expressive of thankfulness, I have skipped three stairs at a time up to the study to begin an answer. My notions of answering letters are according to the literal sense of the word; not waiting six months and then scrawling a lazy reply, but sitting down the moment you have read a letter, and telling, as Dr. Woods says, “How the subject strikes you.” I wish I could be clear that the path of duty lay in talking to you this afternoon, but as I find a loud call to consider the heels of George’s stockings, I must only write a word or two, and then resume my darning-needle. You don’t know how anxiously we all have watched for some intelligence from Hartford. Not a day has passed when I have not been the efficient agent in getting somebody to the post-office, and every day my heart has sunk at the sound of “no letters.” I felt a tremor quite sufficient for a lover when I saw your handwriting once more, so you see that in your old age you can excite quite as much emotion as did the admirable Miss Byron in her adoring Sir Charles. I hope the consideration and digestion of this fact will have its due weight in encouraging you to proceed.

  The fact of our having received said letter is as yet a state secret, not to be made known till all our family circle “in full assembly meet” at the tea-table. Then what an illumination! “How we shall be edified and fructified,” as that old Methodist said. It seems too bad to keep it from mother and Aunt Esther a whole afternoon, but then I have the comfort of thinking that we are consulting for their greatest happiness “on the whole,” which is metaphysical benevolence.

  So kind Mrs. Parsons stopped in the very midst of her pumpkin pies to think of us? Seems to me I can see her bright, cheerful face now! And then those well known handwritings! We do love our Hartford friends dearly; there can be, I think, no controverting that fact. Kate says that the word love is used in six senses, and I am sure in some one of them they will all come in. Well, good-by for the present.

  Evening. Having finished the last hole on George’s black vest, I stick in my needle and sit down to be sociable. You don’t know how coming away from New England has sentimentalized us all! Never was there such an abundance of meditation on our native land, on the joys of friendship, the pains of separation. Catherine had an alarming paroxysm in Philadelphia which expended itself in “The Emigrant’s Farewell.” After this was sent off she felt considerably relieved. My symptoms have been of a less acute kind, but, I fear, more enduring. There! the tea-bell rings. Too bad! I was just going to say something bright. Now to take your letter and run! How they will stare when I produce it!

  After tea. Well, we have had a fine time. When supper was about half over, Catherine began: “We have a dessert that we have been saving all the afternoon,” and then I held up my letter. “See here, this is from Hartford!” I wish you could have seen Aunt Esther’s eyes brighten, and mother’s pale face all in a smile, and father, as I unfolded the letter and began. Mrs. Parsons’s notice of her Thanksgiving predicament caused just a laugh, and then one or two sighs (I told you we were growing sentimental!). We did talk some of keeping it (Thanksgiving), but perhaps we should all have felt something of the text, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Your praises of Aunt Esther I read twice in an audible voice, as the children made some noise the first time. I think I detected a visible blush, though she found at that time a great deal to do in spreading bread and butter for James, and shuffling his plate; and, indeed, it was rather a vehement attack on her humility, since it gave her at least “angelic perfection,” if not “Adamic” (to use Methodist technics). Jamie began his Sunday-school career yesterday. The superintendent asked him how old he was. “I’m four years old now, and when it snows very hard I shall be five,” he answered. I have just been trying to make him interpret his meaning; but he says, “Oh, I said so because I could not think of anything else to say.” By the by, Mary, speaking of the temptations of cities, I have much solicitude on Jamie’s account lest he should form improper intimacies, for yesterday or day before we saw him parading by the house with his arm over the neck of a great hog, apparently on the most amicable terms possible; and the other day he actually got upon the back of one, and rode some distance. So much for allowing these animals to promenade the streets, a particular in which Mrs. Cincinnati has imitated the domestic arrangements of some of her elder sisters, and a very disgusting one it is.

  Our family physician is one Dr. Drake, a man of a good deal of science, theory, and reputed skill, but a sort of general mark for the opposition of all the medical cloth of the city. He is a tall, rectangular, perpendicular sort of a body, as stiff as a poker, and enunciates his prescriptions very much as though he were delivering a discourse on the doctrine of election. The other evening he was detained from visiting Kate, and he sent a very polite, ceremonious note containing a prescription, with Dr. D.’s compliments to Miss Beecher, requesting that she would take the inclosed in a little molasses at nine o’clock precisely.

  The house we are at present inhabiting is the most inconvenient, ill- arranged, good-for-nothing, and altogether to be execrated affair that ever was put together. It was evidently built without a thought of a winter season. The kitchen is so disposed that it cannot be reached from any part of the
house without going out into the air. Mother is actually obliged to put on a bonnet and cloak every time she goes into it. In the house are two parlors with folding doors between them. The back parlor has but one window, which opens on a veranda and has its lower half painted to keep out what little light there is. I need scarcely add that our landlord is an old bachelor and of course acted up to the light he had, though he left little enough of it for his tenants.

  During this early Cincinnati life Harriet suffered much from ill- health accompanied by great mental depression; but in spite of both she labored diligently with her sister Catherine in establishing their school. They called it the Western Female Institute, and proposed to conduct it upon the college plan, with a faculty of instructors. As all these things are treated at length in letters written by Mrs. Stowe to her friend, Miss Georgiana May, we cannot do better than turn to them. In May, 1833, she writes: —

  “Bishop Purcell visited our school to-day and expressed himself as greatly pleased that we had opened such an one here. He spoke of my poor little geography, [Footnote: This geography was begun by Mrs. Stowe during the summer of 1832, while visiting her brother William at Newport, R. I. It was completed during the winter of 1833, and published by the firm of Corey, Fairbank & Webster, of Cincinnati.] and thanked me for the unprejudiced manner in which I had handled the Catholic question in it. I was of course flattered that he should have known anything of the book.

  “How I wish you could see Walnut Hills. It is about two miles from the city, and the road to it is as picturesque as you can imagine a road to be without ‘springs that run among the hills.’ Every possible variety of hill and vale of beautiful slope, and undulations of land set off by velvet richness of turf and broken up by groves and forests of every outline of foliage, make the scene Arcadian. You might ride over the same road a dozen times a day untired, for the constant variation of view caused by ascending and descending hills relieves you from all tedium. Much of the wooding is beech of a noble growth. The straight, beautiful shafts of these trees as one looks up the cool green recesses of the woods seems as though they might form very proper columns for a Dryad temple. There! Catherine is growling at me for sitting up so late; so ‘adieu to music, moonlight, and you.’ I meant to tell you an abundance of classical things that I have been thinking to-night, but ‘woe’s me.’

  “Since writing the above my whole time has been taken up in the labor of our new school, or wasted in the fatigue and lassitude following such labor. To-day is Sunday, and I am staying at home because I think it is time to take some efficient means to dissipate the illness and bad feelings of divers kinds that have for some time been growing upon me. At present there is and can be very little system or regularity about me. About half of my time I am scarcely alive, and a great part of the rest the slave and sport of morbid feeling and unreasonable prejudice. I have everything but good health.

  “I still rejoice that this letter will find you in good old Connecticut — thrice blessed—’oh, had I the wings of a dove’ I would be there too. Give my love to Mary H. I remember well how gently she used to speak to and smile on that forlorn old daddy that boarded at your house one summer. It was associating with her that first put into my head the idea of saying something to people who were not agreeable, and of saying something when I had nothing to say, as is generally the case on such occasions.”

  Again she writes to the same friend: “Your letter, my dear G., I have just received, and read through three times. Now for my meditations upon it. What a woman of the world you are grown. How good it would be for me to be put into a place which so breaks up and precludes thought. Thought, intense emotional thought, has been my disease. How much good it might do me to be where I could not but be thoughtless. . . .

  “Now, Georgiana, let me copy for your delectation a list of matters that I have jotted down for consideration at a teachers’ meeting to be held to-morrow night. It runneth as follows. Just hear! ‘About quills and paper on the floor; forming classes; drinking in the entry (cold water, mind you); giving leave to speak; recess-bell, etc., etc.’ ‘You are tired, I see,’ says Gilpin, ‘so am I,’ and I spare you.

  “I have just been hearing a class of little girls recite, and telling them a fairy story which I had to spin out as it went along, beginning with ‘once upon a time there was,’ etc., in the good old-fashioned way of stories.

  “Recently I have been reading the life of Madame de Stael and ‘Corinne.’ I have felt an intense sympathy with many parts of that book, with many parts of her character. But in America feelings vehement and absorbing like hers become still more deep, morbid, and impassioned by the constant habits of self-government which the rigid forms of our society demand. They are repressed, and they burn inwardly till they burn the very soul, leaving only dust and ashes. It seems to me the intensity with which my mind has thought and felt on every subject presented to it has had this effect. It has withered and exhausted it, and though young I have no sympathy with the feelings of youth. All that is enthusiastic, all that is impassioned in admiration of nature, of writing, of character, in devotional thought and emotion, or in the emotions of affection, I have felt with vehement and absorbing intensity, — felt till my mind is exhausted, and seems to be sinking into deadness. Half of my time I am glad to remain in a listless vacancy, to busy myself with trifles, since thought is pain, and emotion is pain.”

  During the winter of 1833-34 the young school-teacher became so distressed at her own mental listlessness that she made a vigorous effort to throw it off. She forced herself to mingle in society, and, stimulated by the offer of a prize of fifty dollars by Mr. James Hall, editor of the “Western Monthly,” a newly established magazine, for the best short story, she entered into the competition. Her story, which was entitled “Uncle Lot,” afterwards republished in the “May-flower,” was by far the best submitted, and was awarded the prize without hesitation. This success gave a new direction to her thoughts, gave her an insight into her own ability, and so encouraged her that from that time on she devoted most of her leisure moments to writing.

  Her literary efforts were further stimulated at this time by the congenial society of the Semi-Colon Club, a little social circle that met on alternate weeks at Mr. Samuel Foote’s and Dr. Drake’s. The name of the club originated with a roundabout and rather weak bit of logic set forth by one of its promoters. He said: “You know that in Spanish Columbus is called ‘Colon.’ Now he who discovers a new pleasure is certainly half as great as he who discovers a new continent. Therefore if Colon discovered a continent, we who have discovered in this club a new pleasure should at least be entitled to the name of ‘Semi- Colons.’” So Semi-Colons they became and remained for some years.

  At some meetings compositions were read, and at others nothing was read, but the time was passed in a general discussion of some interesting topic previously announced. Among the members of the club were Professor Stowe, unsurpassed in Biblical learning; Judge James Hall, editor of the “Western Monthly;” General Edward King; Mrs. Peters, afterwards founder of the Philadelphia School of Design; Miss Catherine Beecher; Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz; E. P. Cranch; Dr. Drake; S. P. Chase, and many others who afterwards became prominent in their several walks of life.

  In one of her letters to Miss May, Mrs. Stowe describes one of her methods for entertaining the members of the Semi-Colon as follows: —

  “I am wondering as to what I shall do next. I have been writing a piece to be read next Monday evening at Uncle Sam’s soiree (the Semi- Colon). It is a letter purporting to be from Dr. Johnson. I have been stilting about in his style so long that it is a relief to me to come down to the jog of common english. Now I think of it I will just give you a history of my campaign in this circle.

  “My first piece was a letter from Bishop Butler, written in his outrageous style of parentheses and foggification. My second a satirical essay on the modern uses of languages. This I shall send to you, as some of the gentlemen, it seems, took a fancy to it and reque
sted leave to put it in the ‘Western Magazine,’ and so it is in print. It is ascribed to Catherine, or I don’t know that I should have let it go. I have no notion of appearing in propria personce.

  “The next piece was a satire on certain members who were getting very much into the way of joking on the worn-out subjects of matrimony and old maid and old bachelorism. I therefore wrote a set of legislative enactments purporting to be from the ladies of the society, forbidding all such allusions in future. It made some sport at the time. I try not to be personal, and to be courteous, even in satire.

  “But I have written a piece this week that is making me some disquiet. I did not like it that there was so little that was serious and rational about the reading. So I conceived the design of writing a set of letters, and throwing them in, as being the letters of a friend. I wrote a letter this week for the first of the set, — easy, not very sprightly, — describing an imaginary situation, a house in the country, a gentleman and lady, Mr. and Mrs. Howard, as being pious, literary, and agreeable. I threw into the letter a number of little particulars and incidental allusions to give it the air of having been really a letter. I meant thus to give myself an opportunity for the introduction of different subjects and the discussion of different characters in future letters.