1812-1896 Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in 1812 in the little town of Litchfield, Connecticut, where her father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, was a clergyman. Her mother died while Harriet was very young, leaving a family of eight children to the mother's care of her oldest sister Catherine. In 1826 Dr. Beecher received a call to Boston, and Harriet and Catherine went to Hartford, where the latter established a young ladies' school, in which Harriet was first a pupil and later an instructor. Six years later her father became the president of the Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, and the two sisters accompanied him to enter on another educational enterprise. It was during her residence in Cincinnati, on the border of the slave State of Kentucky, that Harriet was first deeply impressed by the sorrows of slavery. In 1836 she married Professor Stowe, one of the instructors in the theological seminary, and a man of lofty character and fine intellect. Mrs. Stowe at this period contributed regularly to the magazines, in spite of her numerous household cares. In 1850 Professor Stowe was called to Bowdoin College, and the family removed to Brunswick. Here, during the next two years, Mrs. Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly," the work appearing in serial form in the "National Era," published in Washington. She received only the paltry sum of three hundred dollars for the serial. In book form the work achieved a most astounding success, three thousand copies being sold on the day of publication, and three hundred thousand more during the first year. It was translated into forty languages, and became the most widely read novel ever written in the English language. In 1853 the Stowes removed to Andover, where Professor Stowe became one of the leading teachers in the theological seminary. This period was one of the happiest and busiest of Mrs. Stowe's life, and Andover was always very dear to her. In 1856 " Dred" was published, and in 1859 she brought out 'The Minister's Wooing," a work in which the author struck a new note, taking New England life instead of slavery for her theme. She made her first trip to Europe in 1853, her reception, especially in England, surpassing that ever accorded to a woman not of royal blood. During the war her literary activity was incessant. She strove especially to stir up sympathy for the Northern cause in England. Her noble "Appeal to the women of England did perhaps as much for the cause of the Union as the eloquent speeches of her famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher. Her later books include Agnes of Sorrento," The Pearl of Orr's Island," and "Oldtown Folks." She also published a book of poems, including many of exquisite beauty. Professor Stowe died in 1886; Mrs. Stowe survived her husband ten years, passing away in 1896 at the age of eighty-five. Both were buried at Andover. 66 Mrs. Stowe's literary style is marked by intense earnestness, sympathy and religious conviction. Her pen appeals to the human heart with sympathetic and stirring effect. Even in her short sketches some definite purpose is always discernible, as in the charming paper on “The Old Oak of Andover," which begins as a reverie and ends as a sermon. When we consider that most of her life was passed amid household cares that gave little time for reading or meditation, the volume of her literary work and the beauty of her style are, indeed, remarkable. S THE OLD OAK OF ANDOVER A REVERY ILENTLY, with dreamy languor, the fleecy snow is falling. Through the windows, flowery with blossoming geranium and heliotrope, through the downward sweep of crimson and muslin curtain, one watches it as the wind whirls and sways it in swift eddies. Right opposite our house, on our Mount Clear, is an old oak, the apostle of the primeval forest. Once, when this place was all wildwood, the man who was seeking a spot for the location of the buildings of Phillips Academy climbed this oak, using it as a sort of green watch tower, from whence he might gain a view of the surrounding country. Age and time, since then, have dealt hardly with the stanch old fellow. His limbs have been here and there shattered; his back begins to look mossy and dilapidated; but after all, there is a piquant, decided air about him, that speaks the old age of a tree of distinction, a kingly oak. To-day I see him standing, dimly revealed through the mist of falling snows; to-morrow's sun will show the outline of his gnarled limbs-all rose color with their soft snow burden; and again a few months, and spring will breathe on him, and he will draw a long breath, and break out once more, for the three hundredth time, perhaps, into a vernal crown of leaves. I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and that if we only knew it, we should find their life's experience recorded in them. Our oak! what a crop of meditations and remembrances must he have thrown forth, leafing out century after century. Awhile he spake and thought only of red deer and Indians; of the trillium that opened its white triangle in his shade; of the scented arbutus, fair as the pink ocean shell, weaving her fragrant mats in the moss at his feet; of feathery ferns, casting their silent shadows on the checkerberry leaves, and all those sweet, wild, nameless, half-mossy things, that live in the gloom of forests, and are only desecrated when brought to scientific light, laid out and stretched on a botanic bier. Sweet old forest days!—when blue jay, and yellow hammer, and bobolink made his leaves merry, and summer was a long opera of such music as Mozart dimly dreamed. But then came human kind bustling beneath; wondering, fussing, exploring, measuring, treading down flowers, cutting down trees, scaring bobolinks-and Andover, as men say, began to be settled. Stanch men were they-these Puritan fathers of Andover. The old oak must have felt them something akin to himself. Such strong, wrestling limbs had they, so gnarled and knotted were they, yet so outbursting with a green and vernal crown, yearly springing, of noble and generous thoughts, rustling with leaves which shall be for the healing of nations. These men were content with the hard, dry crust for themselves, that they might sow seeds of abundant food for us, their children; men out of whose hardness in enduring we gain leisure to be soft and graceful, through whose poverty we have become rich. Like Moses, they had for their portion only the pain and weariness of the wilderness, leaving to us the fruition of the promised land. Let us cherish for their sake the old oak, beautiful in its age as the broken statue of some antique wrestler, brown with time, yet glorious in its suggestion of past achieve ment. I think all this the more that I have recently come across the following passage in one of our religious papers. The writer expresses a kind of sentiment which one meets very often upon this subject, and leads one to wonder what glamor could have fallen on the minds of any of the descendants of the Puritans, that they should cast nettles on those honored graves where they should be proud to cast their laurels. It is hard," he says, " for a lover of the beautiful—not a mere lover, but a believer in its divinity also-to forgive the Puritans, or to think charitably of them. It is hard for him to keep Forefathers' Day, or to subscribe to the Plymouth Monument; hard to look fairly at what they did, with the memory of what they destroyed rising up to choke thankfulness; for they were as one-sided and narrow-minded a set of men as ever lived, and saw one of truth's faces only-the hard, stern, practical face, without loveliness, without beauty, and only half dear to God. |