Meantime Harriet, then eleven years old, had found a stray volume of Byron’s “Corsair.” Her aunt had given it to her one afternoon to appease her craving for something to read. This poem astonished and electrified her. She kept calling to her aunt to hear the wonderful things she found in it and to ask what they meant. “Aunt Esther, what does this mean: ‘One I never loved enough to hate’?” “Oh, child, it’s one of Byron’s strong expressions,” said her aunt. That day Harriet went home full of dreaming about Byron, and after that she listened to everything that was said about him at the table. She heard her father tell about his separation from his wife, and one day he said, “My dear, Byron is dead--gone!” Then after a minute he added, “Oh, I am sorry that Byron is dead. I did hope he would live to do something for Christ. What a harp he might have swept!” That afternoon Harriet took her basket and went up to the strawberry field on Chestnut Hill. But she was too dispirited to do anything. She lay in the daisies and looked up into the blue sky and thought of the great eternity into which Byron had entered, and wondered how it might be with his soul. It is interesting to recall that Harriet’s great English contemporary, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who afterward became the greatest of women poets and was one of Mrs. Stowe’s dear friends, at almost the same time was also mourning in a beautiful poem that “’midst the shriekings of the tossing wind,” “the dark blue depths” he sang of were then bearing all that remained of Byron to his native shore. Harriet would probably know by instinct that no novel would be approved by her father for the children. So we can imagine her joy when one day he brought a novel of Scott’s to her brother George, saying that, though he generally disapproved of such books as trash, yet in these he could see that there were real genius and real culture and therefore he would remove his ban upon them. In that summer Harriet and her brother read “Ivanhoe” through seven times, and they were both able to recite many scenes _verbatim_ from beginning to end. They dramatized it all. They named the rocks and glens and rivers about Litchfield by names borrowed from “The Lady of the Lake”; they clambered among the rocks of Benvenue and sailed on the bosom of the Loch Katrine, using Chestnut Hill and the Great and Little Pond for the purpose. In the reading circles among the law students and among the young ladies they discussed Scott’s treatment side by side with that of Shakespeare, and compared the poetry of Scott and Byron.