When “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had been some four months in the hands of the people, the publishers sent Mrs. Stowe a check for ten thousand dollars! Professor Stowe held this magical piece of paper in his hands and looking helplessly at his wife, said, “Why, Harriet, I never saw so much money in my life!” He had hoped that the book would be successful enough in the financial way to buy for her what she very much needed, a new silk dress. The returns from the sale, however, besides accomplishing that modest result, also brought within reach many comforts hitherto unknown in the house of the professor’s family. More than this, they assured the opportunity for foreign travel and for the beneficial meeting with people in England and elsewhere who sympathized with the cause to which Mrs. Stowe had dedicated her heart.

In the spring of 1853, then, we find her starting out for her first sea voyage. This new experience with that “restless, babbling giant,” the ocean, was described in her first letter home in her accustomed merry vein. If you are going to sea, she wrote to her children, you must have everything ready; you must set your house—that is, your stateroom—in order as if you were going to be hanged, for you may be sure that in half an hour after sailing an infinite desperation will seize you in which the grasshopper will be a burden. Her voyage she declared gave her a new sympathy for babies who are rocked at home without so much as a “by your leave”; she thought it no wonder there are so many stupid people in the world! There were moments, however, when she could conquer the nervous horror she always had of that “rude, noisy old servant” of the Lord, and could feel that the ocean was always obedient to His will, and could not carry her beyond His power and love, wherever and to whatever it might bear her. At one time on a later journey she had this faith put to the test when her ship was run into by another, and she found that it did not fail her, but kept her calm and serene throughout the ordeal.

When Mrs. Stowe, together with her husband and brother, reached England a great surprise awaited them. She had had no realization of the real significance of having written a book of universal pity and love that would awaken a response in every heart among rich and poor. She was dazed that so many people came to the boat to meet her, that she walked up the wharf through a long lane of kindly, welcoming faces, and that wherever she went in England, and especially in Scotland, her carriage was run after by wild flocks of sympathetic people anxious to catch one glimpse of the author of “Uncle Tom.”

She felt, she said, like a child who had set fire to a packet of gunpowder. And if on the approach to some cathedral door her way was blocked by the crowd waiting to see her as she passed in, she could only, in her amazement, quote the words, “What went ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” “It seems to me so odd,” she wrote home from England, “so odd and dreamlike that so many persons desire to see me; and now I cannot help thinking that they will think when they do, that God hath chosen the weak things of this world!”

Evidently Mrs. Stowe had very little conceit about herself. She was always a quiet, unostentatious little body, “a little bit of a woman,” as she described herself, “just as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff.” She must have been utterly wanting in vanity, for when she began to be famous and everybody was desiring to see her, she thought it all simply wonderful and declared that she was “never very much to look at” in her best days.

There have been so many things to say about Harriet Beecher that too little attention has perhaps been given in this book to her personal appearance. Let us make up for that at one stroke. When the Beecher children’s stepmother came to live with them she said that the four youngest children—George, Harriet, Henry and Charles—were all very pretty, and that Harriet and Henry were as lovely children as she ever saw. Harriet combined the aquiline Foote brow with the stronger lines of the Beecher family. She was small in figure and quick in her movements. Her hands were plastic and mobile, the most controlled and manageable hands in the world; their motion made a language in itself. Her dark-brown hair that never lost a warmness of tone until the snow began to fall upon it, curled about her face, and, in the fashion that prevailed during her young ladyhood, was allowed to fall in ringlets on each side. Her eyes were of the blue-gray that takes on all colors as emotion moves the soul; they had often a far-away dreamy expression that came from her complete absorption in thought. For instance, at a luncheon in her honor she did not join in the flow of conversation at all, but sat absorbed in her own thoughts, explaining afterward that she had been making the scheme of a new book and thinking out the characters for it, and had forgotten where she was. In this respect she was like Tennyson who, under similar conditions, is said to have remarked only that he had eaten “too much, much too much!” At other times, however, Mrs. Stowe delighted her fellow guests at some dinner table by her interest in the subject discussed; her heightened color, and her shining eyes, together with the ardor and good sense of her talk, the vivacity of her expression, and the nobility that characterized her points of view, charmed all that came within her circle. After such a time the hostess might go away and complain, as one did, that she had not been told beforehand how beautiful Mrs. Stowe was! The printed pictures that appeared in the English papers never did her justice. But she had too little vanity to mind that. When she saw them she was amazed at the loving kindness of her English and Scottish friends who could keep up such a warm affection for such a Gorgon. She thought that the Sphinx at the British Museum must have sat for most of them. She planned to make a collection of them to carry home to her children—they would be useful, like the Irishman’s signboard, to show where the road did not go! These monstrous pictures, however, did her this service, that everybody was surprised and relieved when they came to her and found that she was not such a perfect Gorgon after all! There was one picture made of her about this time, however, that is worthy of preservation, a beautiful drawing by Richmond. Although Mrs. Stowe said when she saw it, “I shall look like that when I am in heaven!”—still many that knew her in earlier years thought it a good likeness.

Mrs. Stowe found not only curiosity but also friendly welcome among the English people. One typically pleasant English home was opened to them at once. The morning after her arrival she was asked to breakfast at the sister-in-law’s of her host, and on running over in the most informal way found forty people sitting with bonnets on waiting for a chance to meet the lion; all of which would have been embarrassing had not the friendly warmth and cordiality of the circle been made evident by their smiling faces. As she traveled along, friends arose everywhere. Now she rested in some delightful, homelike room by a cheerful fire that flickered on pictures, statuettes, bookcases and all comfortable things, with an armchair drawn up before it and a pot of moss on the table set in the center of a round pin-cushion; or if in the vicissitudes of travel she found herself in the middle of the night in the street with baggage thrown about her and a vociferous circle of cabmen declaring they could do no more to discover a lost address, she would be sure to find shelter in a quiet house which would turn out to be the very place friends had prepared for her and her party. But it was not only in the quiet homes that she found welcome; she saw the routine in a ducal castle from morning prayers on through the joyous drives and visiting of the day to the putting out of the last candle at night. With the Queen herself she had what Professor Stowe called the “pleasantest little interview that ever was.” He described her as a “real nice little body, with exceedingly pleasant, agreeable manners!” And four royal children stared their eyes almost out looking at the author of “Uncle Tom” while the interview was going on.

Mrs. Stowe’s first visit to England was made on the invitation of the Anti-Slavery Society of Glasgow, and the occasion became therefore semi-official in its character. Not only was there a great deal of interest in her personality, but there was also so much enthusiasm for the cause she was held everywhere to represent that associations as well as individuals were anxious to meet her and to do honor to her. Deputations came to greet her from the cities through which she passed and others that were in the vicinity. Every community seemed bent upon putting itself on record. At Glasgow there were deputations from Paisley, Greenock, Dundee, Edinburgh; and not to be outdone by the mother island, Belfast sent one over from Ireland. At the entrance to Edinburgh the magistracy of the city met her and made approaches to her. She was carried through long passages made in the masses of the people and conducted to a gallery where she took her tea with a thousand people and thought the teapot of Hadji Baba, the father of all teakettles, must have been there to go around so large a company. Enthusiastic meetings were held and speeches were made. For the quiet little figure on the platform the answer was always given by her husband whose handsome face and fine presence won everybody to admiration and regard; and when he said that he could not imagine how any sort of a written book could have brought forward such expressions of friendliness as they were showing, that he thought the book had not been written at all, that he “’spected it grew,” the vociferous applause of the audience testified not only to their delight in his sally of wit, but to the fact that they knew by heart their “Uncle Tom,” and especially their excellent Topsy.

They made a practical expression of their sympathy with the cause Mrs. Stowe represented in wonderful gifts. At Edinburgh a national penny offering, summed up in a thousand gold sovereigns, was presented to her on a silver salver; Belfast sent a bogwood casket lined with gold, carved with national symbols and containing an offering for the cause; at Surrey Chapel in London she received an inkstand, which was a beautiful piece of silver work, carved into a group of figures representing Religion with a Bible in her hand giving liberty to the slave. A band of children gave her a gold pen, and she made her only public speech in talking a little to them. Above all other gifts in interest was that presented by the Duchess of Sutherland at Stafford House in London, a bracelet made in the form of a slave’s shackle of ten links and a clasp. On one of the links was inscribed the date of the abolition of the slave trade March 25, 1807, and of slavery in the English colonies August 1, 1834. On the clasp was written the number of signatures to an Address that was presented to Mrs. Stowe on the occasion of that meeting at Stafford House. The number was 562,448. Of this Address we shall hear more after a while. On the other links of the bracelet it was suggested that Mrs. Stowe should have placed the date of the freeing of slaves in our own country; but Mrs. Stowe did not at that time believe that she should live to see the day when that happy event should come about. She was, however, as we know, to have that good fortune within a dozen years, and to record it upon the other links of the historic bracelet.

Many of these meetings were marked by tremendous excitement, such meetings as England has been famous for throughout modern days and such as have brought about many reforms. Attending such a meeting and realizing the strength of the feeling that flowed under the outward expression, Mrs. Stowe said: “I do not believe that there is in all America more vehemence of democracy, more volcanic force of power, than comes out in one of these great gatherings in our old fatherland. I saw plainly enough where Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill came from; and it seems to me there is enough of this element of indignation at wrong, and resistance of tyranny, to found half a dozen republics as strong as we are.”

In such ways as these Mrs. Stowe was becoming acquainted with the very heart of the English and Scottish people. But it was not only the great and titled that came forward to represent the leading thought in greeting this woman who stood to them for so much. In the villages through which they drove and along the roadsides, the so-called common people were ready with their greetings also. In the doorways everywhere people stood bowing and smiling, and sometimes running out to offer flowers; and little boys ran after her carriage crying out that they knew her by the curls! She wrote: “The butcher came out of his stall and the baker from his shop, the miller dusty with flour, the blooming, comely young mother with her baby in her arms, all smiling and bowing with that hearty intelligent friendly look as if they knew we should be glad to see them.” Then there were in various cities meetings especially for the working men; and as her train went along, even at night, friendly faces were waiting at the stations, good souls watching through the dark to catch one glimpse of the writer or perhaps to grasp her hand; then as the train moved away, saying, “Good night!” with the unmistakable Scotch accent, making her think that she had felt a throb of the living Scotch heart. Mrs. Stowe felt the spirit that prompted this reverential tribute, a spirit that makes one blood of all the families of earth. She, in fact, considered herself altogether inadequate and disproportionate as an object to call forth such outbursts of applause; she was most modest in her reception of them, and believed them to be, as she afterward said to a friend, but the expression of a great spirit of universal brotherhood, surging forward in a huge sympathetic wave. Beneath the weight of these honors the New England simplicity of her character remained unimpaired.

Everything that happened to her she enjoyed to the utmost, and she only wished that she had a relay of bodies and could slip from a tired one into a rested one now and then! She began to be so talked out and worn out that there was hardly a chip of her left. To breakfast with forty people, lunch with three hundred, take tea with a thousand, and go to an evening mass meeting and perhaps to more receptions the same night, would be rather trying to a delicate woman who had come abroad chiefly to seek rest after the strain of writing a great book. Mrs. Stowe began to feel a weariness that made seeing people a burden. For besides answering innumerable letters of invitation and congratulation, besides all the receptions and dinners and the babble of innumerable voices, she found that she could not lay her pen entirely aside, but must write full accounts of everything she saw and enjoyed and heard to send to her children at home. It is said that the most valuable document of his time is the “Diary of John Wesley,” because, I suppose, it is so full of unprejudiced and minutely truthful accounts of things that the dignified historians have no time to busy themselves with. In the same way, the series of letters that Mrs. Stowe wrote, afterward published in two volumes, called “Sunny Memories,” contain observations of men and things that scarcely another person of her time would have had the opportunity to gain or to give; these volumes, besides being amusing and enlightening, will have for the future a distinct historic value.

There were many good times to be enjoyed as they went along on their journeys. They kept a bright lookout for ruins and all things that would touch into life their memories of English romance and poetry. They saw that “city of colleges,” Oxford, which seemed to them a veritable mountain of museums, colleges, halls, courts, parks, chapels, and lecture rooms. They took dinner at the White Hart Inn, where the scene of Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives” was laid; they wandered through chambers hung with tapestries woven to tell the tale of Medea and Jason; they had a pleasant drive in Hyde Park as Harriet had read of the heroines of romance doing in old novels; they felt sincere “dispositions to melancholies” beside the churchyard where the “Elegy” was composed, and found out only later that their tears had been shed at the wrong churchyard! They rode on the coach top and listened to the stories told by the driver just as they would have done in their own country; they visited the fishing ground of old Isaak Walton; they went through the great palace at Windsor, and there, above all the splendors they were chiefly interested in one little wicker baby-carriage they happened to see standing waiting for its occupant! All the great works of art Mrs. Stowe saw moved her tremendously; they satisfied a lifelong hunger. How the lofty arches of the cathedrals touched her heart! She realized at once that these triumphs of architectural art give aspiration its noblest symbol, and she found a preparation of mind for religious emotions in the dusky choirs and the flame-like arches gorgeous with evening light. Then when she crossed to the continent and entered the galleries and saw the paintings there and on the walls of the churches, she was again astonished, delighted, and satisfied as never before. She was especially overcome when she saw the “Descent from the Cross” by Rubens. She said: “Art has satisfied me at last. I have been conquered and that is enough.” This was said before she went to Italy, where further enjoyments awaited her in later journeys. A young student of life wishing to make a visit to the great storehouses of delight in art and history in the European world and not able to cross the ocean for the purpose, could not do better than read these perfectly sincere and vital comments upon art, history and things in general found in Mrs. Stowe’s “Sunny Memories.”

In these “Sunny Memories” we see how much it meant to her to come into friendly relations with many people whose names had been well known to her through their books. To a writer the companionship of other writers means much. Mrs. Stowe had here her great opportunity. It would not be possible to go over the large circle of great names she came to know by more than the printed letters. John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley were among them, besides the long lists of people whose titles were not their only claim to interest. In Paris there was another circle of great people, and when she came to Italy, there were the Brownings with whom a warm friendship arose, and many other very congenial people. Then on one of her return journeys she had the pleasure of having for companions Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields.

Among the happiest times that Mrs. Stowe had were the social gatherings in England with some of these literary friends. Seated at dinner where there were perhaps thirty or more at the table, with Macaulay at her right and Milman at her left, she was sometimes embarrassed with riches; she wanted to hear what they were both saying; but by the use of the faculty by which we play the piano with both hands, she got on, she said, very comfortably.

We can quite imagine that in these conversations it must have been sometimes a little startling to have this fresh vivid intelligence turned upon the customs that have in England had the benefit of long settled tradition. At one dinner she said that it had always seemed to her a curious thing that in the height of English civilization one vestige of savagery should remain, namely, sending a whole concourse of strong men out to hunt a single poor little fox or hare, creatures so feeble and insignificant who can do nothing to defend themselves; to her it hardly seemed consistent with manliness. Now, she said, if you had some of our American buffaloes, or a Bengal tiger, the affair would be something more dignified and generous. The gentlemen who heard this only laughed and went on to tell more stories about fox hunting!

Mrs. Stowe was of course confronted with the traditional question as to how the English ladies compared with those of America in beauty. When her turn came she said within herself, “Now for it, patriotism!” Then she assured the questioner that she had never seen more beautiful women anywhere than she had in her own country. But she had to admit that the English ladies held their beauty longer than did those of this country. Why was it? Was it the sea coal and fog that made the women of England preserve their glowing, radiant, blooming freshness till long past fifty? Tell us, Muses and Graces! she cried. Then she suggested various reasons: our close-heated rooms, our hot biscuits and hot corn cakes made with saleratus, our worry over maid service, our climate, and so on. The American woman is possessed, she thought, with the ambition to do the impossible, which is the cause of the death of a third of the women of this country, and by the impossible she means that they try to play not only the head of the family but the head, hand, and foot, all at once! Certainly the undaunted bravery of the American woman in her difficult home arrangements can never be enough admired. Speaking of stoves, she said that she never saw one in England. (This was in 1853.) Bright coal fires in grates of polished steel were still the lares and penates of old England. If there was one thing in her own country that she was inclined to mourn, it was the closing up of the cheerful open fire, with its bright lights and dancing shadows, and the planting on our domestic hearth of that sullen, stifling gnome, the air-tight. She agreed with Hawthorne in thinking the movement fatal to patriotism; for who would fight for an air-tight?

One of the things that Mrs. Stowe noticed in England was that the distinguished people live so remarkably public a life. English newspapers told a great deal more about the concerns of the notable people than American papers tell: where the nobility were staying now, where they would go next, what they had for dinner, what they wore—all these things the English newspapers deemed important. And Mrs. Stowe was surprised also to have them take somewhat the same interest in her, even recording it when she had a dress made, and complaining that she sent it to a dress-maker of whom they did not approve!

When Mrs. Stowe came to France she noticed the ready enthusiasm of the French for all things beautiful, and she compared this with the Puritan distrust of beauty for its own sake which she had seen and felt in New England. She was, of course, not the only one who has felt this about our serious forefathers and their view of life. Now she had found a people that could be equally enthusiastic about a barrel of potatoes and the adorning of a room. She observes: “But did not He that made the appetite for food make also that for beauty? and while the former will perish with the body, is not the latter immortal?” By this we see how far the soul of Harriet Beecher has progressed since the days when she found her love of literature a snare in the way of her spiritual progress.

Mrs. Stowe was delighted with Paris. She was released from care; she was unknown and unknowing. She employed herself in wandering about the shops, the streets and boulevards, seeing and hearing the life of Paris. She wished the children at home could see these Tuileries with their statues and fountains, these family groups under the trees, the men and women chatting, reading aloud or working muslin, the children driving hoops, playing ball, all chattering volubly. Afterwards she was able to give the children the opportunity to see all this when she brought the whole company to spend a winter in Paris to study French.

But the relief from the necessity of seeing people, which would have been so great a pleasure to her if she had not been too tired for it, did not stay with her very long in France, nor in Switzerland whither they next went. Here also the fame of the author had gone before her. All knew the book; they stood in rows to see the author and to ask her to write another that should while away their long winter evenings as “Uncle Tom” had done. “Remember,” they said, “our winter nights here are very long!”

At last they came to Italy. Here every day opened to her a new world of wonders. And when she reached Rome she cried out, “Rome is a world! Rome is an astonishment! Rome is an enchantress! Think of strolling leisurely through the Forum, of seeing the very stones that were laid in the time of the Republic, of rambling over the ruined Palace of the Cæsars, of walking under the Arch of Titus, of seeing the Dying Gladiator, and whole ranges of rooms filled with the wonders of art, all in one morning!... In the Palace of the Cæsars, where the very dust is a mélange of exquisite marbles, I saw for the first time an acanthus growing, and picked my first leaf!”

It was during her second visit to Europe that Mrs. Stowe met the Brownings. That was in April, 1857. Mrs. Browning said of this visit that she and her husband had been charmed by Mrs. Stowe’s simplicity and earnestness, her gentle voice and refinement of manner. Never, said Mrs. Browning, did lioness roar so softly!14 After that and till the end of the life of Mrs. Browning, correspondence was carried on between the two great women, in which the chief subject discussed was the possibility of spiritual communications between us and those that have passed into the other life. Both these great thinkers believed that such communications were within the range of possibility if we were able to realize them spiritually, but not through any material means then known. The same warm and permanent kind of friendship existed between Mrs. 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.” This was an even more passionate treatment of the subject of slavery than was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” though it did not have the concentration and the pathos of the latter. Just as a novel, however, it marked an advance in method and handling, and if one should look behind the preaching one would find a distinct promise for finer workmanship to come in later books. This promise was fulfilled in “The Minister’s Wooing,” “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” and “Agnes of Sorrento,” three novels that belong to this time of quickening by contact with the old world.

But these years between the time of her first novel and the beginning of the sixties were the days of the drawing tighter and tighter of the cords, the bursting of which was to produce our Civil War. To every varying of the needle she was sensitive. To every pang in her country’s agony she was sharply responsive. She wrote to a friend in England: “Sudden, sharp remedies are mercy.” Hating war, she yet said, if by war, then war it must be.