CHAPTER V.
POVERTY AND SICKNESS, 1840-1850.
Famine in Cincinnati.—Summer at the East.—Plans for Literary Work.—Experience on a Railroad.—Death of her Brother George.—Sickness and Despair.—A Journey in Search of Health.—Goes to Brattleboro' Watercure.—Troubles at Lane Seminary.—Cholera in Cincinnati.—Death of Youngest Child.—Determined to leave the West.
On January 7, 1839, Professor Stowe wrote to his mother in Natick, Mass.: "You left here, I believe, in the right time, for as there has been no navigation on the Ohio River for a year, we are almost in a state of famine as to many of the necessities of life. For example, salt (coarse) has sold in Cincinnati this winter for three dollars a bushel; rice eighteen cents a pound; coffee fifty cents a pound; white sugar the same; brown sugar twenty cents; molasses a dollar a gallon; potatoes a dollar a bushel. We do without such things mostly; as there is yet plenty of bread and bacon (flour six and seven dollars a barrel, and good pork from six to eight cents a pound) we get along very comfortably.
"Our new house is pretty much as it was, but they say it will be finished in July. I expect to visit you next summer, as I shall deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Dartmouth College; but whether wife and children come with me or not is not yet decided."
Mrs. Stowe came on to the East with her husband and children during the following summer, and before her return made a trip through the White Mountains.
In May, 1840, her second son was born and named Frederick William, after the sturdy Prussian king, for whom her husband cherished an unbounded admiration.
Mrs. Stowe has said somewhere: "So we go, dear reader, so long as we have a body and a soul. For worlds must mingle,—the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial, wreathing in and out like the grotesque carvings on a gothic shrine; only did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial, since the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred." So in writing a biography it is impossible for us to tell what did and what did not powerfully influence the character. It is safer simply to tell the unvarnished truth. The lily builds up its texture of delicate beauty from mould and decay. So how do we know from what humble material a soul grows in strength and beauty!
In December, 1840, writing to Miss May, Mrs. Stowe says:—