ime writing poetry but discipline her mind upon Butler's Analogy. To
enforce compliance, Harriet was assigned to teach the Analogy to a
class of girls as old as herself, "being compelled to master each
chapter just ahead of the class." This occupation, with Latin, French
and Italian, sufficiently protected her from the dissipation of
writing poetry.

Harriet remained in the Hartford school, as pupil and teacher, from
her thirteenth to her twenty-third year. In her spiritual history,
this was an important period. It may seem that her soul had hitherto
not been neglected but as yet youth and a sunny nature had kept her
from any agonies of Christian experience. Now her time had come. No
one under the care of the stern Puritan, Catharine Beecher, would be
suffered to forget her eternal interests. Both of Mrs. Stowe's
biographers feel the necessity of making us acquainted with this
masterful lady, "whose strong, vigorous mind and tremendous
personality," says Mr. Stowe, "indelibly stamped themselves on the
sensitive, dreamy, poetic nature of her younger sister."

It was Catharine's distinction to have written, it is claimed, the
best refutation of Edwards on the Will ever published. She was
undoubtedly the most acute and vigorous intellect in the Beecher
family. Like all the members of her remarkable family, she was
intensely religious and, at the period when Harriet passed to her
care, gloomily religious. It could not have been otherwise. She had
been engaged to marry Prof. Alexander Fisher, of Yale College, a young
man of great promise. Unhappily, he was drowned at sea, and she
believed his soul was eternally lost. It is futile to ask why Yale
College should have entrusted a professorship to a man whom the Lord
would send to perdition, or why Miss Beecher should have loved such an
abandoned character; it is enough to say that she loved him and that
she believed his soul to be lost; and was it her fault that she could
not be a cheerful companion to a young girl of thirteen?

As we have seen, Harriet must not fritter away her time writing plays;
she must study Butler's Analogy. She must also read Baxter's Saints
Rest, than which, says Mrs. Stowe, "no book ever affected me more
powerfully. As I walked the pavements I wished that they might sink
beneath me if only I might find myself in heaven." In this mental
condition she went to her home in Litchfield to spend her vacation.
One dewy fresh Sunday morning of that period st