My lord, I scarce may trust myself to answer,
Since I have heard such degradation named.
In place of open bold apostasy
Thou dost propose an hourly, daily lie.
Cleon’s whole nature revolts against anything so base. He declares that it is his settled purpose while he lives to leave nothing undone or untried to win everybody to the reverence for Christ that he has learned to enjoy within himself. Thus he defies the Emperor and all the world.
This drama which has many elements of nobility in it and which shows a great deal of skill, filled Harriet’s waking thoughts and her dreams at night, and for a long time she was joyously filling blank book after blank book with the flowing lines. But the play was never finished. Her sister Catherine pounced down upon her one day and told her that she should not waste any more time writing poetry, but that she should discipline her mind by the study of Butler’s “Analogy.” So the obedient Harriet laid aside her loved play and began to write out abstracts of the “Analogy.” Thus her dramatic aspirations were for the time arrested. Catherine snuffed out the little light of her sister’s budding poetic genius; or, rather, perhaps we should say that she turned those powers in another direction; she saved and stored that intellectual energy for a purpose of which neither of them had at that time the remotest dream.
CHAPTER VII
STUDIES AND TEACHERS
After the death of Mrs. Beecher in 1816 the care of the younger ones fell to a large extent upon the elder daughter, Harriet’s capable and energetic sister Catherine, who was some twelve years older than she. So the traditions of the mother Roxana were carried on in the household until a second mother, another highly cultivated lady, came to take the headship of the home.
It is natural that this strong and brilliant Catherine should have a great influence upon the sensitive younger sister, and that the various steps in Catherine’s career and in her soul-history should be followed by Harriet with interest and sympathy almost as great as if she had been a responsible part in the story. And if disturbing experiences came to Catherine, a reflected tumult would naturally pass through the life of Harriet. This is exactly what did happen. Harriet’s days were shaded by the sorrows of Catherine through all the early years of her young womanhood.
Catherine Beecher was destined to be a remarkable woman, author of many books, a trainer of teachers and a founder of educational institutions. The range of her thought seems to have been almost unlimited. She wrote on education, on slavery, on the evils suffered by American women and on the duties of American women to their country. She wrote on all subjects connected with the home. In one book only she treats of the following topics: The dignity and importance of woman’s work, the Christian family, scientific domestic ventilation, stoves, furnaces and chimneys, home decoration, health, exercise, food, cookery, early rising, domestic manners, system and order, charity and economy, care of infants, management of children, care of the aged, of servants, of the sick, accidents and antidotes, fires and lights, care of rooms, of yards and gardens, cultivation of plants, and care of domestic animals—and of all these things she writes with the object of dignifying domestic employment and increasing the wages paid for it. As if this were not enough to fill a single volume, she adds twenty-five more chapters on recipes of all kinds, meats and breads, preserving fruits, setting table, washing, ironing and cleaning; and finally she adds a chapter of “miscellaneous advice.”