It is unfortunate that her father did not think to say to her what he wrote in a letter some twenty years later: “Too long, quite too long, has the devil held in his exclusive possession the fine arts.” He came to the conclusion in the end that ministers would make their sermons more interesting if they would add to their “leaden prose” some of the untrammeled fire that gives charm to poetry and fiction. That Dr. Beecher had an open mind on this subject is shown by his attitude toward Byron and also toward the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It could never have been a pain to him to know that a daughter of his would become the author of a shelf full of novels, all strongly uplifting in their tendency. But Harriet did not confide her deepest thoughts to him. If she had he might have recalled that his own early days had been checkered with despondency and shamefacedness and jealous feeling. He had imagined in his sensitive humility that everybody could see the interior of his mind and find the emptiness and vanity that he believed must be there. Yet he had a good cure for such moods, one that he could have recommended to his daughter. He resisted all this, he once said, as if it were a physical lying disease, representing things that were not as if they were, and saying to such feelings, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savorest not the things that be of God!” But at the time of Harriet’s greatest despondency her father seems not to have remembered the cravings and perplexities of his own youth. Harriet made up her mind to live a far better life. She would regulate it and improve it. She gave herself a strict set of rules, a regular system of things for every hour of the day. But she found that she could not live up to all this and the derelictions gave her sleepless nights. Her feelings were not always equable. She was absent-minded and made mistakes. Terrible faults, these! How like a page from the life of everybody! The trouble in Harriet’s case was that she took these variations of mood for a serious breakdown of her religious stability. She suffered intensely, yet for a long time she kept her suffering to herself. Her naturally buoyant spirits did much to help her, but often she was reproved for laughing so much when she was feeling worst. It was difficult for Harriet to speak of these inner feelings to others. The reason for this was that she was too humble-minded to speak of so weighty matters at all. Besides this, she felt that she should understand them better than she did, and did not know that every human being is beset by the same questions that puzzled her. Fortunately, Harriet at the age of fourteen had a brother who had just graduated at Yale and was studying theology at Andover. This strong and tender brother to whom she opened her heart just as Catherine had opened hers to her father, unraveled many of her difficulties for her.