James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

[297] mother. She was a woman of extraordinary talents, rare culture, fine taste, sweet and gentle temper; full of the Holy Ghost and of that power which comes not with observation, but whose exercise is alike unconscious and irresistible.

She died when Harriet was not quite four years old, but “her memory and example had more influence in moulding her family, in deterring from evil and exciting to good, than the living presence of many mothers.”

Mrs. Stowe relates that when, in her eighth year, she lay dangerously ill of scarlet fever, she was awakened one evening just at sunset by the voice of her father praying at her bedside, and heard him speaking of “her blessed mother, who is a saint in heaven!” The passage in Uncle Tom, where St. Clair describes his mother's influence, is simply a reproduction of the influence of Mrs. Stowe's own mother, as it had always been in her family.

All who have read the “Minister's Wooing” must remember the beautiful letter which Mary wrote to the Doctor. That letter is one which, years before, Mrs. Beecher had written, and was copied by Mrs. Stowe into the pages of her story. Immediately after her mother's death, Harriet was taken to live with her mother's sister, in whose well-ordered house the little girl found a happy home, the tenderest care, and the benefits of an unusually wholesome moral discipline and intellectual companionship. Her mother had been a quiet but devout churchwoman who, at her marriage with Dr. Beecher, conformed herself to the simpler manners of the Congregational churches, and bent her steps to the ways in which her husband walked, but not without cherishing an ineradicable love of the better way in which her fathers walked and worshipped. Something of this feeling Harriet may have inherited. Having had such a mother, she found herself, in the circle of her mother's relatives, surrounded by those who