It is a great book. When something has been as persistently demanded as long as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has been by the northern public and the "Conquered Banner" by the southern public; when thousands upon thousands of plain people weep over them and lay them away to weep over them again, you may know--it matters not what the unruffled and sarcastic critic may say--that each is a work of the very highest and the very rarest genius. Tears of sympathy for tales of distress and misery, whoever can set their fountain flowing is always a nature's king or queen. I have read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" four times: first at Princeton in 1852; the second time amid the gloom of reconstruction, more accurately to ascertain northern opinion of the negro and forecast therefrom, if I could, what was in store for the south; the third time as I was meditating the Old and New South; and just the other day the last time. The more familiar I become with it the greater seems to me the power with which the attention is taken and held captive. The very titles to the first twelve chapters are, in their contents and sequence, gems of genius, and draw resistlessly. I become more and more impatient with Ruskin's reprehending the escape of Eliza, when, with her child hugged to her bosom, she leaps from block to block of floating ice in the Ohio until she is safe on the other side--a marvel like the ghost's appearance in the first scene of Hamlet, exciting a high and breathless interest at the outset, which is never allowed to flag afterwards. Whenever I begin to read the book, I fall at once into that illusion which Coleridge has so well explained. I accept all her blunders and mistakes as real facts, and although it is hard to tolerate her negro travesties and the anti-slavery sentiments of her southern whites, somehow they do not then offend me, and there is chapter after chapter in which I follow the action with breathless interest. "Gulliver's Travels" and "Pilgrim's Progress" are examples to show how little of reality either entertaining or moving fiction needs. From a mass of false assumptions, seasoned with the merest sprinkling of fact; and especially from her taking for granted that the negro is really on a par of development with the white, she has constructed the Iliad of our time. The nursery tale out of which Shakspeare fashioned the drama of Lear did not furnish him with smaller resources. What a wonderful action he puts in the place of the nursery tale! how natural and probable it all appears to us as it unfolds! how we hate, or pity, or admire, or love as we cannot keep from following it! Likewise every reader in the north accepted Mrs. Stowe's novel as the very height of verity, and afterwards saw in every fugitive slave a George Harris, or Eliza, or an Uncle Tom. And the book evoked the same effect out of America. The most curious proof of this that I can think of is the statue of The Freed Slave, which I saw on exhibition at the Centennial.