negroes in the "black belt" of the cotton-growing States. This
is the most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of
thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some
forty translations were made into foreign tongues. In its dramatized
form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating
libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other
single book. It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the
public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more
even than Garrison's _Liberator_; more than the indignant poems of
Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It
presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular it
made the odious Fugitive Slave Law forever impossible to enforce. It
was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture
was exaggerated and that overseers like Legree were the exception. The
system under which such brutalities could happen, and did sometimes
happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point out defects of taste and
art in this masterpiece, to show that the tone is occasionally
melodramatic, that some of the characters are {544} conventional, and
that the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others coarse.
In spite of all it remains true that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is a great
book, the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and
uttering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the heart
of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first
success. Some of her novels of New England life, such as the
_Minister's Wooing_, 1859, and the _Pearl of Orr's Island_, 1862, have
a mild kind of interest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial
ways and traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like _Pink
and White Tyranny_, and _My Wife and I_, are really beneath criticism.

There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs.
L. H. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as
"the Hemans of America," but now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival of
New Haven, a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of
value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler
poems, still in circulation, such as _To Seneca Lake_ and the _Coral
Grove_. Another Hartford poet, Brainard--already spoken of as an early
friend of Whittier--died young, leaving a few pieces which