It was during her second visit to Europe that Mrs. Stowe met the Brownings. That was in April, 1857. Mrs. Browning said of this visit that she and her husband had been charmed by Mrs. Stowe’s simplicity and earnestness, her gentle voice and refinement of manner. Never, said Mrs. Browning, did lioness roar so softly![14] After that and till the end of the life of Mrs. Browning, correspondence was carried on between the two great women, in which the chief subject discussed was the possibility of spiritual communications between us and those that have passed into the other life. Both these great thinkers believed that such communications were within the range of possibility if we were able to realize them spiritually, but not through any material means then known. The same warm and permanent kind of friendship existed between Mrs. Stowe and George Eliot. Mrs. Stowe was in Europe first in 1853, again in 1856-7, and the third time in 1859-60. In the intervals she was very hard at work in her home in Brunswick, Maine, and afterwards in a new home in Andover, Massachusetts, whither her husband had been called to the Theological Seminary. First she was writing the “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a compendium of the facts and materials she had used in writing the novel. Following this was the second anti-slavery work, a novel entitled “Dred.” This was an even more passionate treatment of the subject of slavery than was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” though it did not have the concentration and the pathos of the latter. Just as a novel, however, it marked an advance in method and handling, and if one should look behind the preaching one would find a distinct promise for finer workmanship to come in later books. This promise was fulfilled in “The Minister’s Wooing,” “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” and “Agnes of Sorrento,” three novels that belong to this time of quickening by contact with the old world. But these years between the time of her first novel and the beginning of the sixties were the days of the drawing tighter and tighter of the cords, the bursting of which was to produce our Civil War. To every varying of the needle she was sensitive. To every pang in her country’s agony she was sharply responsive. She wrote to a friend in England: “Sudden, sharp remedies are mercy.” Hating war, she yet said, if by war, then war it must be. CHAPTER XVIII A UNIQUE JUBILEE One day twenty farmers came to the Stone Cabin in Andover where the Stowes lived and sat down with Professor Stowe to ask the question, Will it be a long war? And he had answered buoyantly, Oh, no, short and decisive it will certainly be!