Of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Germany has nine separate translations and France thirteen, besides dramas and abridgments, and chansons, and Russia has five. In Welsh and in Italian there are three; Finnish and Flemish must now be included and Hungarian and Illyrian, Portuguese, Modern Greek and Servian; Wallachian and Wendish and Yiddish are not in Dr. Holmes’ list, but should be. By 1913 there were sixty-six translations of this almost universal book, not counting abridgments or dramas. Of English editions there are forty-three, and in this country, how many? We have lost count. It would be also quite impossible to add up the dramatic versions of Eliza’s fateful adventure. All of this goes to show that Whittier was hardly stretching the truth when he wrote his poem To her who world-wide entrance gave To the log-cabin of the slave, Made all his wrongs and sorrows known, And all earth’s languages his own! It was a long time before people could look at the book fairly and judge of its literary rank; and even to this day there are writers who call “Uncle Tom” merely a colossal piece of journalism. It was indeed written at white heat and with the swiftness of a bird’s flight. “Hurry! help! hurry! help!” must have been ringing in her ears as she wrote. During the winter that she wrote the book she had been running through with her children the novels of Scott, and Scott is the writer to whom she is the nearest of kin in the art of writing. There was a time when the tireless hand of that great story-teller was seen by an observer in a window across the way, to go back and forth, back and forth, through the evening and the night and into the wee sma’ hours. This makes us think of Mrs. Stowe’s smooth fluent script and the lightning swiftness of her little hand. She wrote like the wind, listening not for the cackle of literary critics, but to the inner voice that kept saying, “Write!” So it happens that its lapses of style, its carelessness of technical laws have been a stumbling block to some good souls that have fed on other traditions and theories. The truth is that words grow from age to age; laws of style perish and new laws blossom out of their graves; but a torch of human sympathy once truly set alight will burn on forever. Mr. Howells in “My Literary Passions” says that he felt the greatness of the book when he first read it; and as often as he has read it since he has seen more and more clearly that it is a very great novel. He says that the art in it is very simple and perhaps primitive, yet it is still a work of art. Its power, however, is to him inexplicable.