MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE wrote before and after the production of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” works of some merit, but nothing that approached the wonderful story that did more to arouse the nation to the wrongs of slavery than all other influences combined. According to her own words, she composed in a state in which she was overwhelmed with the subject and forced to write as she did. DICKENS entered the same state, and with such distinctness were his characters brought before him, that he heard their voices, and his dialogues were the work of a reporter rather than of a composer. BUNYAN.--Perhaps no book ever exerted a greater influence than “Pilgrim’s Progress,” written by one who in his youth was wild and godless, a tramping tinker and rough soldier, uneducated and unversed in literary invention. He possessed in a prominent degree the sensitive temperament, as his portrait shows, and a fine mental endowment, however uncultivated it might have been. So long as Bunyan was a part of the jostling world, he was like other men. His sensitiveness could only be made valuable by isolation, and that came to him in an unlooked for manner by his incarceration in jail. There his spirit gained freedom. It became susceptible to the thoughts of another sphere, and he wrote that remarkable book, which has pleased and strengthened millions of struggling souls. Afterwards, when liberated, he became one of the fanatics among whom he was cast, and his writings and speech were of no value, except as they faintly echoed what he had written in his “Pilgrim.” Once only had the conditions essential to sensitiveness been his, and then it was forced upon him, and the result was one book of value, and no more. The success of that book destroyed the conditions for the reception of anything as pure, bringing around him the jarring conflict of religious fanaticism. TENNYSON.--The sensitive condition of Tennyson has been graphically described by himself, in words which leave no misunderstanding. In a letter written in 1874 to a friend, he says: “I have never had any revelation through anesthetics, but a kind of waking trance (this for want of a better term) I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of the individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this is not a composed state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where Death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality, (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state was utterly beyond words?”