Stowe

“ On the other hand, I have never seen so many perfections concentrated in one human being as Mrs. Stowe has conferred upon the daughter of a slave-holder. Evangeline is an image of beauty and goodness which can never be effaced from the mind, whatever may be its prejudices. Yet her whole character is fragrant of the South; her generous sympathy, her beauty and delicacy, her sensibility are all Southern. They are "to the manor born,' and embodying as they do the Southern ideal of beauty and loveliness, cannot be ostracized from Southern hearts, even by the power of the vigilance committees. ”

“ Stowe, instead of creating for our delight and instruction a glorious work of fiction, had contracted her fine powers to the point of inventing a nutcracker or a match-safe, a rolling-pin or a needle-threader, every individual purchaser could have been compelled to pay money for the use of her ingenuity, and everybody would have thought it the most natural and proper thing in the world so to do. ”

“ It was a marvelous sight that greeted her eyes as she took her seat and looked out over the white expanse of the tables that filled the audience room of the church. Already the long procession of strange guests was filing in; from the platform they looked like rivers of inky blackness flowing through the aisles and around the table. To the eyes of Mrs. Stowe it was a tragic scene, for she knew that these poor people had made their escape with untold sufferings. She saw that many were still in the tattered garments they had worn as they crept through the swamp ”

“ Eliza sickened, and strained her child closer to her bosom; the old woman prayed and groaned, and George and Jim clenched their pistols with the grasp of despair. The pursuers gained on them fast; the carriage made a sudden turn, and brought them near a ledge of a steep overhanging rock, that rose in an isolated ridge or clump in a large lot, which was, all around it, quite clear and smooth. This isolated pile, or range of rocks, rose up black and heavy against the brightening sky, and seemed to promise shelter and concealment. ”

“ She would have spoken to tell her husband her fears, but checked herself.
"No, no,—he has enough to bear, poor fellow!" she thought. "No, I won't tell him; besides, it an't true; Missis never deceives us."
"So, Eliza, my girl," said the husband, mournfully, "bear up, now; and good-by, for I'm going."
"Going, George! Going where?"
"To Canada," said he, straightening himself up; "and when I'm there, I'll buy you; that's all the hope that's left us. You have a kind master, that won't refuse to sell you. I'll buy you and the boy;—God helping me, I will!" ”

“ 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 ”

“ Stowe removed from Andover to Hartford, Connecticut, where, in a lovely wooded suburb on the bank of a river, she built a house that was her home until the end of her life. Up to the death of her husband in 1886 she spent the winters at Mandarin, Florida, called thither by the condition of her son Frederick, who, at the close of the war, came back to her in a state of broken health resulting from a wound in the head received at Gettysburg. ”

“ If she were a man, she cried, she would go and she believed she could take good care of at least one window.
By this time Mrs. Stowe had gained some practical knowledge of what the slavery system really meant. When she had been but one year in Cincinnati she had gone with friends to visit a plantation across the river. Here she had seen a happy prosperous slave life, under owners that seemed to be the sincere well-wishers of the negroes who served them. There was little to shock or distress her in what she saw. Most of the day she moved about as one in a dream. ”

“ Stowe’s life. First twin daughters arrived and were named Eliza Taylor and Harriet Beecher. Two years later Henry Ellis was born. Then came Frederick William, named for the Prussian King for whom his father had a great admiration. Georgiana May followed and Samuel Charles was the next. This, omitting the last little one whose life was sacrificed in the cholera epidemic, made the circle of five who went with the little mother when she preceded her husband to the new home in Maine. Soon after her arrival there her seventh child was born and was named Charles Edward. ”

“ Stowe, I feel that, since so many and good people, too, at the North, have quietly consented to leave the slave to his fate, by acquiescing in and approving the late measures of government, those who do feel differently should bestir themselves. ”

“ The heavy tidings no doubt hath already travelled to Stowe that we have lost our blessed master by the enemy’s advantage. You must not, dear lady, grieve too much for your noble spouse. You know, as we all believe, that his soul was in heaven before his bones were cold. He fell, as he did often tell us he wished to die, in the great Stuart cause, for his country and his king. ”

“ Three men, mounted on horseback, were coming up, the headmost of whom, riding up quickly behind, struck him so heavy a blow with a gutta percha cane, as to fell him to the earth. In an instant, however, he was on his feet again, and had seized the bridle of his horse.
"Who are you?" said he; for, by the dim light that remained of the twilight, he could perceive that they all wore masks.
"We are men," said one of them, whose voice Clayton did not recognize, "that know how to deal with fellows who insult gentlemen, and then refuse to give them honorable satisfaction." ”

“ Stowe was a quietly observant person on the banks of the Ohio, not a flaming Abolitionist, not a fiery partisan; having a real and strong regard for the good qualities of the Southern people; fully comprehending their inherited difficulties, and having for them a charitable sympathy. ”

“ After no penurious commendations of Stowe’s labours, he is permitted “to gather the benevolence of well-disposed people within this realm of England; to ask, gather, and take the alms of all our loving subjects.” These letters-patent were to be published by the clergy from their pulpits; they produced so little, that they were renewed for another twelvemonth: one entire parish in the city contributed seven shillings and sixpence! Such, then, was the patronage received by Stowe, to be a licensed beggar throughout the kingdom for one twelvemonth! ”

“ Stowe is, like Blenheim, another specimen of English grandeur and magnificence. The park embraces a large tract of undulating ground, with fine trees; the house is a noble building in the Italian style. The grounds were laid out long ago; and though in many respects beautiful, and remarkable for fine lofty trees, are so overloaded with temples and buildings of all sorts, that the greatest possible improvement to the place would be the pulling down ten or a dozen of them. There is a charming flower-garden, thickly surrounded with high trees, firs, cedars and evergreens, and flowering shrubs. ”

“ Stowe would be considered a neighbor or an incendiary? As the Almighty Ruler of the universe and the Maker of man has said that He has made all the nations of the earth of one blood, and man in His own image, the black man, irrespective of his color, would seem to be a neighbor who has fallen among his enemies, that have deprived him of the fruits of his labor, his liberty, his right to his wife and children, his right to obtain the knowledge to read, or to anything that earth holds dear, except such portions of food and raiment as will fit him for his despoiler's purposes. ”

“ Stowe and George Eliot.
Mrs. Stowe was in Europe first in 1853, again in 1856-7, and the third time in 1859-60. In the intervals she was very hard at work in her home in Brunswick, Maine, and afterwards in a new home in Andover, Massachusetts, whither her husband had been called to the Theological Seminary. First she was writing the “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a compendium of the facts and materials she had used in writing the novel. Following this was the second anti-slavery work, a novel entitled “Dred.” ”

“ An old age more serenely beautiful than that of Harriet Beecher Stowe could scarcely be imagined. Honored throughout the world, happy in the beautiful companionship of children in the Hartford home, she passed on through the years, living in a dream world full of happy, loving thoughts. ”

“ We do not wonder that the copy before us is of the seventieth thousand. And seventy thousand more will not supply the demand, or we mistake the appreciation of the American people of the real merits of literary productions. Mrs. Stowe has, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," set up for herself a monument more enduring than marble. It will stand amid the wastes of slavery as the Memnon stands amid the sands of the African desert, telling both the white man and the negro of the approach of morning. ”

“ Stowe house was pulled down. Within the memory of one man, grass grew and was mown in the meadow where sprang up Stowe house, and grew and was mown in the meadow where Stowe had been.
A few crumbling walls only mark the site of the old home of the Granvilles. [9]
The Cornish people in former days were passionately fond of theatrical performances. In numerous parts of Cornwall there exist green dells or depressions in the surface of the ground, situated generally on a moor. ”

“ Surely this crypt ought to be spared for the sake of Stowe, and Gerard the giant, and the May-pole—the compass of which the honest old historian measured. What a picture it would make—Stowe, the host, and the ostler, with the old building and the broken ladder! what rich material for a chapter in an historical romance! If we live, we will do it some day. Of course the old hall was swept away in the Great Fire, and Gerard the giant (which we have here engraved) grew up after the flames had died out ”

“ In January, 1836, Harriet Beecher and Calvin Edward Stowe were quietly married. A few days later they took a brief wedding journey, going by stage as far as Columbus; but the roads in an Ohio midwinter were not much to boast of, and, as a pleasant journey, the trip was not a success. They were happier when they returned to their own fireside and sat down there peacefully together. Mrs. Stowe was rather astonished to find that such a “wisp of nerve” as herself could pass through the wedding experience with a happiness that was tranquil and serene rather than overwhelming. ”

“ Of far greater interest, however, is Stowe (Anglo-Saxon for a stockaded place) , at one time a magnificent building. Of it only the moat remains, but when Sir Beville rose for Charles I., many a Cornishman, who in his boyhood had stayed at Stowe, practising arms under the eye of Anthony Payne, rose with him.
The Battle of Stamford Hill
To Stratton, a little south of Stowe, came in 1643 the Parliamentarian General, Lord Stamford. The cavaliers, not then very prosperous, but gallant gentlemen all, were lying at Launceston, and the Roundhead made the mistake of underestimating their strength. ”

“ Stowe was teaching in the Hartford School she was not without pupils that were full of mischief. One of these, being very fond of animals and bugs of all kinds, used to bring her favorites and install them in the desk, shutting down the wide cover as a door to their prison until she should get a chance to show them to her best-loved teacher, Miss Harriet Beecher, who could look unappalled into the desk with its nests of spiders or its families of toads, for there was not a creature that God could create that Harriet did not love. ”

“ Stowe, "became my favorite resort in cases of emergency. If anyone wishes to have a black face look handsome, let them be left as I have been, in feeble health, in oppressive hot weather, with a sick baby in arms, and two other ones in the nursery, and not a servant in the whole house to do a turn." "Time would fail me," writes Mrs. Stowe, "to tell you all that I learned incidentally of the slave system in the history of various slaves who came into my family, and of the underground railroad which, I may say, ran through our house." ”

“ Stowe conclude to visit Europe," wrote Senator Sumner, "she will have a triumph." The prediction was fulfilled. At Liverpool she is met by friends and breakfasted with a little company of thirty or forty people; at Glasgow, she drinks tea with two thousand; at Edinburgh there was "another great tea party," and she was presented with a "national penny offering consisting of a thousand golden sovereigns on a magnificent silver salver." She had the Highlands yet to see as the guest of the Duke of Argyll, not to mention London and Paris. ”

“ George smiled sadly, and made no answer.
Eliza turned to the glass, and the scissors glittered as one long lock after another was detached from her head.
"There, now, that'll do," she said, taking up a hair-brush; "now for a few fancy touches."
"There, an't I a pretty young fellow?" she said, turning around to her husband, laughing and blushing at the same time.
"You always will be pretty, do what you will," said George.
"What does make you so sober?" said Eliza, kneeling on one knee, and laying her hand on his. "We are only within twenty-four hours of Canada, they say. ”