The account of Harriet’s education may sound somewhat meager to those who do not look beneath the surface. But it must be remembered that her own family formed an educational institution in itself. New England was celebrated, as Mrs. Stowe afterwards said, for “crisp originalities of character.” And even against this background the Beecher family stood out as a “sharp-cut and peculiar set.” These highly individual qualities in her parents and in her brothers and sisters made a constant current of life beneath the roof of the Beecher parsonage. It was an education to hear her father discuss things, whether at dinner or at wood-sawing or on a picnic; for he was like a high-mettled horse in a pasture, as Mrs. Stowe said of one of her characters in her novel, “My Wife and I”; he enjoyed once in a while having a free argumentative race all round the theological lot. But this discussion was by no means left to the leader alone; all the children were expected to take part. The home circle thus became a great lyceum of thought. The rule of these debates was that each one should contribute his thought and bear his part with boldness, independence and originality. In this way the father trained the children in toughness, tenacity and endurance. Harriet’s father would have disowned any child that refrained in fair argument from putting forth every atom of logical strength he possessed. Every boy was expected, in supporting his opinions, to exert himself to the utmost, but without sophistry or unfairness. Against a refusal to argue or a resort to evasion or trick, the father’s anger burned like fire. And no child was allowed to find fault if his arguments were roughly handled, or to grumble and get angry if he were bruised or floored in fair debate. A stranger looking upon some hotly contested discussion might have said that the doctor and his children were angry with each other. Never! They were only in earnest. Moreover, the great household was filled with a spirit of active service, carried out with cheerfulness and even hilarity. Or if perchance the will for obedience deflected a little from perfection, the father’s sharp call, “Mind your mother. Quick! No crying! Look pleasant!” was sufficient to bring stragglers into line at once.

The work and plans and interests of the household went on like a great well-balanced machine, in which one little cog, that good child Harriet, was taking its part according to its ability. Harriet was also getting ready to perform a greater part, for all these home experiences were turning in a direction that gave her a special preparation for her life-work.

At this time Harriet’s older sister, Catherine, was considered by far the more promising daughter. She did become a most efficient woman, who wrote a long list of educational books and who had a great influence on the schools of her time throughout the country. When Harriet was in the early teens, however, Catherine was simply a brilliant young woman, efficient, sparkling and full of life. She caused a breath of mirth to flow through the home every minute, even the stern father being indulgent toward her pranks and jokes. She made every occurrence the subject of a bit of composition in prose or in verse, like the “epithet” for the kit. Everything was turned into literary expression; the disappearance of a favorite calf inspired a threnody; if a precious brown-edged platter was smashed, an epic poem was forthwith composed; if a marriage took place among the cousins, a ballad appeared into which the names of all the guests were woven and which was learned by heart by every one and was quoted for months.

In such an atmosphere as this it is not strange that the bent of Harriet’s mind toward writing should have been strengthened. The wonder is not that she developed in that direction, but that she did not begin to write even earlier than she did. We shall see that the reasons for that were sufficient.

A great deal has been said about Harriet’s father, but her mother must have a special word also. It could be said of her, as it has been of another ideal woman of history, that to know her was in itself an education. Roxana Foote Beecher belonged to the old Guilford Foote family, so conspicuous for intellectual and social attainments in the early New England days. One of Harriet’s sisters, in writing to her daughter of the Foote homestead at Nut Plains near Guilford, said: “These Footes are a people by themselves in their literary accomplishments, their good sense and fine breeding. Their homestead almost talks to you from its very walls of the days gone by. I never felt more sure of spirit companionship of the highest order, and your father thinks few parlors in all the land have gathered a more noble company. The place is full of rich and inspiring associations.”

In this Foote family there were traditions that must have been especially inspiring to a child like Harriet Beecher. One of the stories centered about a young girl named Lucinda Foote, who was born in Chester, Connecticut, only a few years before Roxana Beecher’s time. She displayed great taste for study and attained a distinction that not many other girls of her time gained. She was the daughter of the Reverend John Foote, the minister in Chester, a man distinguished for his scholarship.

Little Lucinda Foote studied the “learned languages,” as they were called, that is, Latin and Greek, and when she was only twelve years old she was examined in them by the President of Yale College, the great Ezra Stiles. He testified in a parchment which is one of the precious treasures among her descendants that she had shown commendable progress in these studies, giving the meaning of passages in the Æneid of Virgil, the select Orations of Cicero and also in the Greek Testament, and that she was “fully qualified except in regard to sex to be received as a pupil in the freshman class in Yale University.” It may satisfy a natural curiosity to add that this child afterwards privately pursued a full collegiate course, including Hebrew, under President Stiles; was married at the age of eighteen; had ten children and lived to be sixty-two years old! In fact, as the elderly Mrs. Cornwall, wife of the physician in Chester, Harriet Beecher may possibly have seen her as she passed through the village in the stage coach on her way to visit her aunts in Guilford.

The traditions of this highly intellectual family were carried on excellently by Roxana Foote. Even in her girlhood, when the spinning-wheel was her daily companion, it was a habit of hers to adorn one end of the wheel beam with the pile of fleecy rolls ready for the spinning and then to lay on the other end an open book which, with its face down, waited for the minute when her conscience would allow her to leave her work and pore for a while over its pages. Roxana’s grandfather, General Ward, used to tell a story about his three granddaughters. He said that when the three girls came down in the morning Harriet Ward’s voice would be heard briskly calling, “Here! take the broom; sweep up; make a fire; make haste!” Betsy Chittenden would say, “I wonder what ribbon it’s best to wear at that party?” But Roxana Foote would say, “Which do you think was the greater general, Hannibal or Alexander?”

Roxana took advantage of every opportunity for culture. From a French gentleman who, after the massacres at San Domingo had taken refuge in this country and settled in Guilford, she learned French and became able to speak it fluently. He lent her the best French authors, which she studied as she spun flax, tying the book, face forward, to the distaff. She had a brother who went into business in New York; while visiting him she studied drawing and painting with water colors and in oils; afterwards when any problem in perspective puzzled her she flew to the encyclopedia and was not content till she had overcome the difficulty. She was highly gifted in artistic execution of many kinds. She painted miniature portraits upon ivory for various members of her family and for her pupils and rarely failed to get a good likeness. Her needlework was a marvel in its delicacy and complexity; bobbin lace and cobweb stitch like hers have now passed out of memory. The house was full of works of ingenuity devised by her which adorned wall and furniture and drapery. Her famous Russian stove, made with the aid of a mason from the description in her encyclopedia, warmed six rooms with less fuel than many of her neighbors used for a single fire. In fact, the second Mrs. Beecher declared that this wonderful stove entirely annihilated the winter indoors.

Under her mother’s guidance, Catherine, at about fourteen, decorated with landscapes a new chamber set of beautiful white wood, the bureau, dressing-table, candlestand, washstand and bedstead. She surrounded the pictures with garlands of flowers and fruits, and then varnished them according to a recipe in the same encyclopedia. Once Dr. Beecher sent home a whole bale of cotton which he bought just because it was cheap. Roxana found a use for this commodity. She conceived the idea of making a carpet of it—a thing unheard of in the little Long Island town where they began their housekeeping together. In that primitive place they still covered their floors with sand dampened and smoothed over, marking this smooth surface with the broom in zig-zag lines if they wanted decoration. But Mrs. Beecher’s artistic mind took a higher flight. She carded and spun the bale of cotton, had it woven, cut and sewed it to fit the parlor, and then stretched it on the garret floor to begin the operations. Here she brushed it over with thin paste to make a stiff foundation. Meantime she had sent to her brother in New York for paints and had learned from the invaluable encyclopedia how to use them. She painted flowers and leaves in groups on this background, taking for models the plants in her own garden. The carpet, when it was done, was the admiration of the whole town, but the deacons, when they came to the door, did not dare to step on anything so splendid; they also thought it a sin to make the room so magnificent that the splendors of Heaven would lose their attractiveness! “Do you think,” said one of them, “that you can have all of this and Heaven besides?”

It is difficult to say what her chief interests were, she was so full of activities. She loved works on philosophy and on science, and was ingenious in making devices for experiments in natural philosophy. She was intensely interested in all the new books of poetry. Writing to her sailor brother Samuel, she besought him to come up to Litchfield to visit them. “Just pack yourself into the chaise,” she said, “and come up here and see how pleasant it is in winter. You might fancy yourself at sea now and then when we have a brisk breeze, with the help of a little imagination. You might find sundry other things to amuse you. I have a new philosophical work you may study and some new poems you may read.” This was in November, 1814, when Harriet was two years old; while her mother was writing Harriet was clinging about her neck praying her to stop writing and make her a doll baby!

Mrs. Beecher was modest and retiring in the highest degree, so that she could not speak with a stranger or a guest without having the beautiful color sweep over her face; and she was so shy that she could never lead the weekly “female prayer-meeting”; yet she had so much tact that she never angered her impetuous husband, and she was the life and the center of the Beecher home.

But details like these, after all, give us very little insight into her real character. We may perhaps judge what sort of woman she was by the influence she had upon her children.

From what Harriet said of her we can see that she must have been the very quintessence of womanliness, of motherliness. Harriet said: “Mother was one of those strong, restful, yet widely sympathetic natures, in whom all around seemed to find comfort and repose. She was of a temperament peculiarly restful and peace-giving. Her union of spirit with God, unruffled and unbroken even from very early childhood, seemed to impart to her an equilibrium and healthful placidity that no earthly reverses ever disturbed.” In almost every book that Mrs. Stowe wrote she pays tribute to her mother in her pictures of motherly feeling. All the mother influence upon St. Clair in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is Harriet’s offering upon the altar of her own mother’s memory.

Harriet’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher, said that the loss of his mother was like a cheating of his heart’s best possession. All his life long he felt that there was a moral power in his memory of her—one of those invisible blessings that faith comprehends, but that cannot be weighed or estimated.

We may come a little nearer yet to an understanding of Roxana Foote’s character if we take a quotation from one of her letters written to Dr. Beecher before their marriage. Old-time love-letters were of a more serious kind than those of to-day. When the prevailing thought of a time dwelt upon religious questions it was but natural that the spiritual condition of the one beloved should be of the deepest concern to the lover. With such a thought we may read this passage which is given as a light upon the inner impulses and character of Harriet’s mother.

Roxana’s lover had, it seems, asked her certain perplexing questions as to her religious experience. In answer she said: “You ask, when I feel a degree of joy, whether it arises from anything I perceive in the character of God that charms me, or from anything that I perceive in myself that I think will charm God? I think the former.... In contemplating the character of God, His mercy and goodness are most present to my mind, and as it were swallow up His other attributes. The overflowing goodness that has created multitudes of human beings that He might communicate to them a part of His happiness, and which openeth His hand and filleth all things with plenteousness, I can contemplate with delight.... I can not now describe what have been my feelings before, but on Sunday night I experienced emotions which I can find no language to describe. I seemed carried to Heaven and thought that neither height nor depth nor things present, nor things to come, should be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus. Yet, if I feel a degree of joy, I fear to indulge it and tremble at every emotion of pleasure. Last night I was almost in Heaven, but sunk to earth again by fears that I should rejoice without cause, but when I prayed my fears seemed to remove.”2

When we read such a love-letter as this we can a little understand how every son of that mother should become a notable minister of the Gospel and each daughter a source of wide influence for good.

It is also a matter beyond dispute that a mother with such tastes and accomplishments as Mrs. Beecher possessed would see to it that the education of her daughters on the artistic side should not be neglected. And in fact there was need—at any rate we should think so to-day. In the Litchfield Female Academy there was indeed some instruction in art. Painting, embroidery and the piano were at that time considered the essential things in the proper education of a young lady. The description that Aurora Leigh gives of the instruction she received at the hands of her English aunts in the first book of Mrs. Browning’s great poem, “Aurora Leigh,” belongs to about the same period and will be considered sufficiently laughable by the girls of to-day. Ideas in New England were not very different from these. In the Academy in Litchfield they painted flowers that were delicate and stiff; they worked samplers and coats of arms in chenille and floss; pastoral pieces were in great favor, representing fair young shepherdesses sitting with crooks in their hands on green chenille banks, tending animals of uncertain description which were to be received by faith as sheep. There were mourning pieces with a willow tree by a family monument and weeping mourners with faces artfully concealed by flowing pocket-handkerchiefs. The sweet confiding innocence, said Mrs. Stowe with gentle irony in “Oldtown Folks,” which regarded the making of objects like these as more suited to the tender female character than the pursuit of Latin and mathematics was characteristic of the ancient régime. Did not Penelope embroider, and all sorts of princesses, ancient and modern? And was not embroidery a true feminine grace?3 We may well doubt if Harriet took much interest in these beasts of floss and chenille and probably preferred, as we should think she would, her childhood landscapes of gray and brown mosses. But when she was older and could follow her home instruction in painting she gained a skill that made sketching landscapes and other work in water color a resource to her all her life.

In music, too, Harriet was not without opportunities for culture. Her mother, Roxana, played the guitar from her girlhood. Her father was devoted to the violin which always lay near him in the attic study to be taken up whenever the strain of his work made him feel the need of relaxation. Under the influence of such parents it is not strange that every member of the Beecher family began singing at a very early age. One of Harriet’s sisters said that she learned to read music by note as soon as she learned to read print. Dr. Beecher must have had the soul of music within him. He once said that if he could play what he heard inside his soul he would beat Paganini. But not being able to do that he had to content himself with “Merrily O” and other melodies of a simple sort. But whatever he may have lacked in execution he managed at every church he served as minister to infuse into the singing a portion of his own buoyant enthusiasm. In earlier days the Puritan singing had been of a plaintive and minor kind. Lyman Beecher called forth a song of a bolder, livelier, more triumphant character, and uniting his endeavors with those of Lowell Mason, the great leader in later New England hymnology, he worked a great change in the psalmody of his country.

We do not think of the New England meeting-house as being the home of music, but to Harriet Beecher the singing in the Sabbath service must have meant a great deal. The Puritan music, with its solemn undertone of deep emotion, had a mysterious power over her. When the “wild warble” of “St. Martin’s,” which ran like this:

or “China” with its weird yet majestic movement of which this first line may remind us:

when these old beloved tunes swelled and reverberated through the church they expressed to her a solemn assurance of victory. In the old fuguing tunes, too, there was a wild freedom and energy of motion that came from the heart of a people who had been courageous in combat and unshaken in endurance. They were like the ocean when it is aroused by stormy winds when deep calleth unto deep in tempestuous confusion, from which at last is evolved peace and harmony. Whatever a trained musician might say of such a tune as old “Majesty,” no person of imagination and sensibility could ever hear it well rendered by a large choir without deep emotion. So thought Harriet; and when back and forth from every side of the church came the different parts shouting

there was at least one young heart in the audience that could scarcely contain its rapture and that held itself quite still until the tempest sank away to peace in the words:

Stirred to the depths by songs such as this on Sunday, Harriet came home to a family that were making the rafters ring with music all the week. A fine-toned upright piano, which some lucky accident had brought within the means of the poor minister, had been early brought all the way from New Haven; Harriet said that never was ark of the covenant brought into the tabernacle with such gladness as when this magical instrument came into their abode. Then indeed was the house filled with music. Catherine and Harriet had regular instruction from a charming and beautiful performer. Edward and William learned to play on the flute. Dr. Beecher brought out his fiddle, and many evenings were given to concerts in which piano, violin, flute and voice united, and Scotch ballads and hymns and chorals resounded through the house.

Sunday evening was a particularly pleasant time in the Beecher home. Something of the old law about Sunday observance ending at sundown still held in New England. And when the boys, who were closely watching, had at last seen the required three stars come out—why, that decided the matter; it was really evening, the Sabbath was over, and playing could now begin without making their consciences prick. When the preaching was done for the day, Dr. Beecher would join the family, and music would be in order. Never was the father so entertaining as at this time. He was lively, sparkling, jocose. He got out the old yellow music book and his faithful friend, the violin, and played “Auld Lang Syne,” “Bonnie Doon,” “Mary’s Dream” and other favorites. On week day evenings a concert like this ended with “Money Musk” and “College Hornpipe,” and perhaps after the mother had gone to bed the father would exhibit the wonders of a double shuffle remembered from the corn-huskings of his youth; but it is said that the results on the feet of his stockings made the female authorities frown on them to such a degree that after a while the exhibition became a rare treat.

But there were other ways in which the high spirits of this sometimes frisky parent amused the family. For instance, in pursuance of a sort of dare the musical father went through the house before the housekeeper was up, energetically playing “Yankee Doodle.” At another time when he was tired of theological study he began to play the fiddle under the schoolroom (in the days when they had a school in the home), much to the delight of the pupils; but the mother came downstairs, took the instrument gently from his hands, carried it upstairs, and laid it on the desk in the schoolroom. This closed that incident and gave us an example of the mother’s tact in managing a rather difficult situation.

But not to dwell upon the jocose side of things which kept the life in the Beecher home from becoming too serious and dull for the welfare of a company of little ones who were full of activity that needed outlet, it is plain that there were many broadening educative influences about Harriet Beecher in her own immediate home.

These were also supplemented by others of a still wider character. When Harriet stayed at the Foote homestead in Nut Plains down near Guilford she slept in a bed that was hung with curtains of printed India linen on which bloomed strange mammoth plants with endless convolutions of branches in whose hollows appeared Chinese summer houses adorned with countless bells which gay Chinese attendants were ever in the act of ringing with a hammer. There were also sleepy-looking mandarins, and birds bigger than the mandarins. Drowsy little girl Harriet wondered why the bells did not ring when struck, and why the mandarins never came out of their summer houses.

These Oriental treasures were brought by a famous sea-faring uncle of Harriet’s, Uncle Samuel Foote. He had been a sailor at sixteen, a commander of a ship at twenty-one. And he, of course, was Harriet’s hero of romance. He it was that brought the frankincense from Spain, the mementos of the Alhambra and of the ancient Moors. He sent mats and baskets, almonds and raisins from Mogadore, Oriental caps and slippers, South American ingots of silver and hammocks wrought by the Southern Indian tribes. And when he came speaking French and Spanish and full of the very atmosphere of a great and wonderful world that lay beyond the rims of the mountains, what stories of adventure the children could hear! What discussions about the respective value of Turk and Christian! What keen observations upon all life everywhere!

And this uncle always brought a box of books, the newest thing, the latest. He it was that sent up into the hills the wonderful “Salmagundi” of Irving the minute it was printed. He kept track of everything that Roxana might desire and saw to it that she received the last word in philosophy, art and poetry.

Still other opportunities were given to the acutely observing little girl to know the great outside world, its interests, its burdens. There was, for instance, Aunt Mary Hubbard who, returning from San Domingo, opened a vista into a life full of romance and tragedy. This admired aunt braids strangely into the pattern of Harriet’s life, as we shall see in a later chapter. Then Harriet’s father was always off for some tour of theological interest, bringing back a refreshing atmosphere of the outside world. We must also remember that Litchfield was full of young men who came to attend the Law School and who made the town more or less breezy. Among them was a French count who remembered the Beecher family to his latest days. These students and the young ladies of the Academy came from all parts of the country, each adding to the enlargement of life that such a collection of personalities always brings.