It was not a retired and quiet life that Harriet lived during her most formative years. She was on an intellectual highway and at a crossroads where many influences of the richest inspiration were felt.

The town attracted fine and interesting people from everywhere; and from all of them she was receiving liberalizing influences that were helping to make of her the great woman that she afterwards became.

In such a home circle as that of the Beechers, books were the very breath of life. From 1799, when Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote were married, they had taken the Christian Observer, a paper conducted by Macaulay, Wilberforce and Hannah More, and they had always procured as many books as they could afford of those that were mentioned in that paper. A valuable encyclopedia came to the household as a gift from an English gentleman whose daughters had boarded with the family. This bulky and useful work was not, as is often the case in our day when the public library is just around the corner, left to fall to pieces on the dusty shelf, but it was made a constant source of reference in all their lively discussions.

It may be thought that Harriet would have a constant resource in her father’s library. This attic study did indeed afford her a harbor, but his tastes and necessities were naturally for theological works and the walls of his room were fairly choked with tall volumes for his own use. Searching through such a library as this Harriet’s despairing and hungry glances found only such titles as these: Bell’s “Sermons,” Bogue’s “Essays,” Monnet’s “Inquiries,” Toplady on “Predestination,” Housley’s “Tracts”—not such books as would do much toward feeding the beauty-loving instinct of a gifted child.

One of the heroines in a book written by her when she was a woman is described in this way: “She was well-read, well-bred, high-minded, high-principled, a little inclined to be ultra-romantic, maybe.” We may surely think of Harriet as fitting this definition, even including the romantic inclination—that is, she was fond of stories of adventure, and was full of high feelings and enthusiasms. It would not be strange if the story-loving side of her nature bloomed a little shyly, since it had been almost starved. But it could not die.

This spirit of lofty enthusiasm is illustrated by what she felt when as a little girl she first heard the Declaration of Independence read. She had but a vague idea of what it meant, but she gathered enough from the recital of the abuses and injuries that had driven her nation to revolt to feel herself swelling with indignation and ready with all her little mind and strength to applaud what seemed the resounding majesty of the Declaration. She was as ready as any one to pledge her life, fortune and sacred honor for such a cause. The heroic element was strong in her. It had come down from a line of Puritan ancestors; when the little girl heard that document read the spirit of her father swelled her little frame and brightened her cheeks and made her long to do something, she scarce knew what, to fight for her country or to make some declaration on her own account. This spirited child needed food for the imagination and fancy. She needed contact with the genius-lighted minds of the past. She had the power to assimilate a great amount of intellectual food, and she was hungry for it.

The first satisfaction she had for her intense longing for what she would call interesting reading was in the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of Bunyan. We know how deeply this sank into her heart from the fact that in the books she wrote she often illuminates her thought by some apt illustration from the Pilgrim’s adventures. That her mind began very early to be haunted by those memories of the Pilgrim we know from one story about her youth.

It is related that sometimes when she was prowling about in the back attic she would timidly open a little door that she found in the side of the chimney and would peer into the dark abyss that yawned within. Looking into that smoky and fearsome place, she was reminded of the door that the Pilgrim found in the walls of a certain valley, an opening which was the way that hypocrites go in at, whence issued the scent of brimstone together with a rumbling noise as of fire. As this thought came to Harriet she would shut to the little door in the chimney with a bang and run away to a more friendly part of the house, seeking some room that might perhaps be called a “Chamber of Peace.”

This name could certainly be applied to her father’s study. Harriet loved that attic of her father’s with its quiet and its rows of books. There she would cuddle down in a corner and watch her father as he sat in his great writing chair with his Bible and his Cruden’s “Concordance” and now and then whispered out his rapidly forming sermon. She looked about upon those mysterious books with awe. To her father there was evidently good magic in them, but to her their charm was unrevealed. To be sure, from Harmer’s work on “Solomon’s Song” and from a book called “The State of the Clergy during the French Revolution,” she could gain some food for her hungry fancy. There was also Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia,” that wonderful account of how this plantation of New England was made so considerable in a space of time so inconsiderable, a work that was a perfect storehouse of tales of these strange old days. These were wonderful stories indeed! And they were all about her own country, too, and made her feel that she herself trod upon ground that was consecrated by some special dealings of God’s Providence.

Nevertheless the story-loving side of little Harriet could never be convinced that there were no more lively bits to be found among all those unpromising black books. She sought perseveringly, and her efforts were rewarded. In a side closet full of documents there was a weltering ocean of pamphlets in which she dug and toiled for hours, to be repaid by disinterring a delicious morsel of “Don Quixote” that had once been a book, but was now lying in forty or fifty broken scraps amid Calls and Appeals, Essays, Replies and Rejoinders. The turning up of such a fragment, she thought, was like the rising of an enchanted island out of an ocean of mud. Further searches in certain barrels of old sermons brought to her a battered but precious copy of the “Arabian Nights.” She was now happy; such books as these could be read and re-read forever without ever palling.

We must remember that there were in those days no books written specially for children and so arranged as to be interesting at each step of the child’s growth. Harriet had to grow to the great books, but as she had a very precocious and devouring mind she was fully ready by the time that she discovered the Oriental story-book in the bottom of the barrel, to read all the big words in Scheherazade’s long-winded, fascinating tales.

It was Harriet Beecher’s good fortune that no silly or trashy books were thrown in her way, to the injury or ruin of her mental development. Under all these encouraging influences she grew with astonishing rapidity, but in a perfectly simple and normal way.

Mrs. Stowe herself tells us in “The Minister’s Wooing” what was thought to be the proper selection for the personal library of a well-taught young lady of those times. Upon the snowy cover of the small table under her looking-glass should lie “The Spectator,” “Paradise Lost,” “Shakespeare” and “Robinson Crusoe.” Beside them of course the Bible should rest. There should also be the works of Jonathan Edwards. Laid a little to one side, as perhaps of doubtful reputation, might be found the only novel which the stricter people in those days allowed for the reading of their daughters, that seven-volumed, trailing, tedious, delightful old bore, “Sir Charles Grandison”—a book whose influence was almost universal and might be traced even in the epistolary style of some grave divines.

A story is told of a certain young lady of Litchfield, probably a devourer of such books as this, who was once going in the stage from Litchfield to Hartford and happened to have Miss Sally Pierce, the principal of the Female Academy, for traveling companion. Miss Pierce recommended to the young lady the purchase of “Wilberforce’s View.” The young lady took this advice, paying the sum of six shillings for the work. Miss Pierce also suggested the “Memoirs of Miss Susanna Anthony” which could be bought for three and six, and a book called “Reflections on Death” which she declared to be very interesting as well as instructive. We are not told that the young lady did not slip in also “The Lady of the Lake,” which was just then becoming a fashionable book in the hill towns of Connecticut, or even perhaps volume one of that great romance, “Sir Charles Grandison.”

Harriet no doubt had books of the same solemn and metaphysical kind recommended to her by her beloved teacher, but decidedly not the seven-volume novel. We do not know that Harriet had a little room to herself and a small library of her own. But she must have read that classic novel some time, or how could she have pronounced it a bore? Besides this, we know that once when she was almost an old lady she stood on her feet with bonnet on and read a chapter of “Sir Charles” through to the end, oblivious of the fact that she was keeping a dinner party waiting for her to come.

Fortunately for Harriet with her strong literary instincts, the tastes of her mother were more catholic than were those of her theological father; she included philosophical, scientific and poetic books among her favorites. In one of her letters to her sister-in-law she said: “May has, I suppose, told you of the discovery that the fixed alkalies are metallic oxyds. I first saw the notice in the Christian Observer and have since seen it in the Edinburgh Review.” Her eager mind led her to add: “I think this is all the knowledge I have obtained in the whole circle of the arts and sciences of late; if you have been more fortunate, pray let me have the benefit.”

To Mrs. Beecher a new interesting book was an event, heard of across the ocean, watched for as one watches for the rising of a new planet; and while the English packet was slowly laboring over, bearing it to our shores, expectation in the family was rising. When the book was to be found in the city book stores an early copy generally found its way to the family circle in Litchfield. Miss Edgeworth’s “Frank” came, and was read aloud to their great edification. Many a box of books appeared through the thoughtfulness of Uncle Samuel, who always selected the latest and most interesting things. “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Marmion” made an epoch by their arrival; they were read in the home with wild enthusiasm, and afterwards spouted in glorious hours by the children. Can we take ourselves back to the freshness of a time when a letter from the mountains to a New Haven sister could contain this message: “John brought ‘The Vision of Roderick,’ a poem by Scott. Do tell me about Scott.” There was an eager, unjaded appetite in that mountain town that would give a rapturous welcome to such a poem as the “Lady of the Lake,” such a novel as “Ivanhoe.” These were the days when the heart of the world was being periodically agitated by the appearance of a new Waverley novel; it was the time, too, of Moore, Southey, Wordsworth, and, above all, of Byron.

Ah, Byron! It was the day of Byron, too. Over the sea came the rolling rhythms, the bravado and the mockery of the wonderful living poet. Over the sea came, too, the Byronic melancholy and the loose, waving Byronic necktie. The sensitive young attendants of the Law School suffered from the one and wore the other. We know that they suffered from the Byronic melancholy, for Dr. Beecher preached against it; and this time he did, as he used to say, take hold without mittens. He preached cut and thrust, hip and thigh, and did not ease off. His sermon was closed with an eloquent lamentation over the wasted life and misused powers of the great poet.

Meantime Harriet, then eleven years old, had found a stray volume of Byron’s “Corsair.” Her aunt had given it to her one afternoon to appease her craving for something to read. This poem astonished and electrified her. She kept calling to her aunt to hear the wonderful things she found in it and to ask what they meant. “Aunt Esther, what does this mean: ‘One I never loved enough to hate’?” “Oh, child, it’s one of Byron’s strong expressions,” said her aunt. That day Harriet went home full of dreaming about Byron, and after that she listened to everything that was said about him at the table. She heard her father tell about his separation from his wife, and one day he said, “My dear, Byron is dead—gone!” Then after a minute he added, “Oh, I am sorry that Byron is dead. I did hope he would live to do something for Christ. What a harp he might have swept!” That afternoon Harriet took her basket and went up to the strawberry field on Chestnut Hill. But she was too dispirited to do anything. She lay in the daisies and looked up into the blue sky and thought of the great eternity into which Byron had entered, and wondered how it might be with his soul.

It is interesting to recall that Harriet’s great English contemporary, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who afterward became the greatest of women poets and was one of Mrs. Stowe’s dear friends, at almost the same time was also mourning in a beautiful poem that “’midst the shriekings of the tossing wind,” “the dark blue depths” he sang of were then bearing all that remained of Byron to his native shore.

Harriet would probably know by instinct that no novel would be approved by her father for the children. So we can imagine her joy when one day he brought a novel of Scott’s to her brother George, saying that, though he generally disapproved of such books as trash, yet in these he could see that there were real genius and real culture and therefore he would remove his ban upon them.

In that summer Harriet and her brother read “Ivanhoe” through seven times, and they were both able to recite many scenes verbatim from beginning to end. They dramatized it all. They named the rocks and glens and rivers about Litchfield by names borrowed from “The Lady of the Lake”; they clambered among the rocks of Benvenue and sailed on the bosom of the Loch Katrine, using Chestnut Hill and the Great and Little Pond for the purpose. In the reading circles among the law students and among the young ladies they discussed Scott’s treatment side by side with that of Shakespeare, and compared the poetry of Scott and Byron.

In the family all this great new poetry was read aloud—which is indeed the best and only way to get the good of poetry. And though Harriet’s father was necessarily most interested in theological argument and discussion, he, too, was fond of poetry and read it with wonderful expression. Harriet thought it the greatest possible treat to hear him read passages from that world-poem, “Paradise Lost.” Especially was she moved when he read the account of Satan’s marshaling of his forces of fallen angels. The courage and fortitude of Milton’s Satan enlisted her in his favor, and when her father came to the passage beginning

and ending with the lines,

her father himself burst into tears and the reading was ended for that day. Perhaps that poem was a favorite with Dr. Beecher because Milton’s confessed object in writing had been to “justify the ways of God to man,” and this was a theme that would appeal strongly to the great preacher.

Of course, if one were to speak of the books that were read by the future author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” one would have to name first and foremost the one that was the daily and almost hourly study and reading and talk of all members of the Beecher home, the Bible. What Harriet Beecher Stowe thought of that book is written at large in all her works. Especially in the novel, “My Wife and I,” she takes occasion to speak of what she thinks it means to a young man to have a thorough knowledge in the mind and the heart of that world-embracing book. It may be said also that her own books express in their content the spirit of the Bible. When later in life Mrs. Stowe traveled in the mountains of Switzerland, she said that she rejoiced every hour while among those scenes in her familiarity with the language of the Bible, for there alone could she find vocabulary and images to express her feelings of wonder and awe!