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
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced
Of Heaven,
and ending with the lines,