A DAY IN THE PAMFILI DORIA 358 THE GARDENS OF THE VATICAN 362 ST. PETER'S CHURCH 363 THE MISERERE 364 The frontispiece portrait of Mrs. Stowe is from a photograph taken in 1862. The vignette (Mrs. Stowe's home at Andover, Mass.) is from a painting in 1860 by F. Roundel. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. No one can read Mrs. Stowe's writings as a whole without perceiving how constant is the appeal to the religious sensibilities. Her greatest book, which took captive the humblest reader and such a genius in literature as George Sand, was in a marked degree a religious book; and again and again, even in playful scenes, there is a quick passage to the religious nature. The explanation is in the simple fact that Mrs. Stowe herself from early girlhood to her latest years was governed by religion, and it is not surprising, therefore, that an entire volume should be gathered from her writings exclusively given over to direct expression of religious feeling and thought. She would gladly, especially in her later life, have confined herself to writing of this sort, for the realities of faith, especially the presence of the Divine Master, came to have a commanding power over her mind and heart, and to make her almost impatient of much concern about adventures of the ordinary sort. Even the reminiscence of the racy life of the New England of her childhood could not absorb her. "I would much rather," she writes in 1876 to her son Charles, "have written another such a book as _Footsteps of the Master_, but all, even the religious papers, are gone mad on serials." The book which she was then writing was _Poganuc People_, and the reader knows what a thread of religious experience runs through that lively narrative. _Footsteps of the Master_ was published in 1877. In its original form, each section contained interludes of verse, sometimes her own, more frequently hymns and poems from well-known sources. There were also scriptural passages illustrative of the great divisions, and the book was set forth thus as a devotional companion. In reissuing it in this volume, the poems by the author have been preserved in the section given to her Religious Poems; the others and the illustrative scriptural passages have been omitted and Mrs. Stowe's Meditations preserved in their continuous form. The word "To the Reader," prefixed to the volume, is as follows:-- When a city is closely besieged and many of its outworks destroyed, the defenders retreat to the citadel. In our day there is warm fighting about the outworks of Christianity. Many things are battered down that used to be thought indispensable to its defense. It is time to retreat to the citadel; and that citadel is CHRIST.