The school of fiction that during the later period stands for the depicting of New England life and character in their actuality had as its pioneers Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke. Both did their earlier work in the spirit and manner of the mid century; both were poets and dreamers; both until late in their lives worked with feeling rather than observation and gave to their fiction vagueness of outline and romantic unreality. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was written by one who had never visited the South, who drew her materials largely from her feelings and her imagination, and made instead of a transcript of actual life, a book of religious emotion, a swift, unnatural succession of picturesque scene and incident, an improvisation of lyrical passion--a melodrama. It is the typical novel of the period before 1870, the period that bought enormous editions of _The Lamplighter_, _The Wide, Wide World_, and _St. Elmo_. _The Minister's Wooing_, 1859, a historical romance written in the Andover that a little later was to produce _Gates Ajar_, was also fundamentally religious and controversial: it contained the keynote of what was afterwards known as the Andover movement. It dealt with a people and an environment that the author knew as she knew her own childhood, and it had therefore, as _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has not, sympathy of comprehension and truth to local scene and character. And yet despite her knowledge and her sympathy, the shadow of the mid century lies over it from end to end. It lacked what _Elsie Venner_ lacked, what the great bulk of the pre-Civil War literature lacked, organization, sharpness of line, reality. Lowell, a generation ahead of his time, saw the weakness as well as the strength of the book, and in pointing it out he criticized not alone the author but her period as well. "My advice," he wrote her with fine courage, "is to follow your own instincts--to stick to nature, and avoid what people commonly call the 'Ideal'; for that, and beauty, and pathos, and success, all lie in the simply natural.... There are ten thousand people who can write 'ideal' things for one who can see, and feel, and reproduce nature and character."[107] Again the voice of the new period in American literature. But Mrs. Stowe was not one to heed literary advice; her work must come by inspiration, by impulse connected with purpose, and it must work itself out without thought of laws or models. _The Pearl of Orr's Island_ came by impulse, as later, in 1869, came _Oldtown Folks_. "It was more to me than a story," she wrote of it; "it is my résumé of the whole spirit and body of New England, a country that is now exerting such an influence on the civilized world that to know it truly becomes an object."[108] That these books, and the _Oldtown Fireside Stories_ that followed, do furnish such a résumé is by no means true, but that they are faithful transcripts of New England life, and are pioneer books in a field that