He died in May, 1877, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, near London, England.
CHAPTER XIV
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
1811-1896
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first distinguished woman writer of America, was born at Litchfield, Conn., in those old New England days when children were taught that good little girls must always speak gently, never tear their clothes, learn to knit and sew, and make all the responses properly in church. Such is her own story of her early education, to which is also added the item that on Sunday afternoons she was expected to repeat the catechism, and on the occasion of a visit to her grandmother, her aunt made her learn two catechisms, that of her own faith, the Episcopal, and that of Harriet's father, who was a Presbyterian minister. This discipline, however, had no depressing effect upon the child, whose family consisted of a half-dozen healthy, clever brothers and sisters, a father who was loved more than revered even in those days when a minister was regarded with awe, and a stepmother whose devotion made the home-life a thing of beauty to be held in all after-years in loving memory.
The old Presbyterian parsonage where Harriet was born had in it one room that was the child's chief delight. This was her father's study, in a corner of which she loved to ensconce herself with her favorite books gathered around her, and read or day-dream, while her father sat opposite in his great writing-chair composing the sermon for the next Sunday. Children's books were not plentiful in those days, and Miss Edgeworth's Tales and Cotton Mather's Magnalia were her principal resource, until one joyful day, rummaging in a barrel of old sermons, she came upon a copy of The Arabian Nights. These flowers of fairy lore took healthy root in the imagination of the little Puritan child, whose mind had hitherto resembled the prim flower-beds of the New England gardens, where grew only native plants. The old stories opened a new world of thought, and into this unknown realm she entered, rambling amid such wonderful scenes that never again could their mysterious charm cease; when some time later her father came down from his study one day with a volume of Ivanhoe in his hand, and said: "I did not intend that my children should ever read novels, but they must read Scott," another door into the realm of fairy was opened to the delighted child.
This power to lift and lose herself in a region of thought so different from her own, became thereafter the peculiar gift by which she was enabled to undertake the work which made her name distinguished.
The library corner, however, did not hold all the good things of life, only part of them. Outside was the happy world of a healthy country child, who grew as joyously as one of her own New England flowers. In the spring there were excursions in the woods and fields after the wild blossoms that once a year turned the country-side into fairy-land; in the summer was the joy of picnics in the old forests, and of fishing excursions along the banks of the streams; in the autumn came nutting parties, when the children ran races with the squirrels to see who could gather the most nuts; and in the winter, when the snow and ice covered the earth, life went on as gayly as ever, with coasting and snow-balling, and the many ways in which the child's heart tunes itself to the spirit of nature.
By the time she was five years old Harriet was a regular pupil at a small school near by, whither she also conducted, day after day, her younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher, afterward the celebrated preacher. She was a very conscientious little pupil, and besides her school lessons, was commended for having learned twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters in the Bible during one summer. School-life henceforth was the serious business of existence, and in her twelfth year she appears as one of the honor pupils at the yearly school exhibition, and was gratified by having her composition read in the presence of the distinguished visitors, her father, the minister, being among the number. The subject of the composition was the immortality of the soul, and into it Harriet had woven, as only a clever child could, all the serious thoughts that she had gleaned from theological volumes in the library, or sermons that her father preached, or from the grave conversations that were common among the elders of the family. It was listened to with great approval by the visitors, who saw nothing absurd in the idea of a child of twelve discoursing upon such a subject, and it was especially pleasing to Harriet's father, which so delighted the affectionate heart of the little writer that she felt no higher reward could be hers.