There is no doubt that Mrs. Stowe was wholly possessed by her theme, rapt away like a prophet in a vision, and that, in her feeling at the time, it was written through her quite as much as by her. This idea grew upon her mind in the retrospective light of the tremendous stir the story made in the world, so that in her later years she came to regard herself as a providential instrument, and frankly to declare that she did not write the book; "God wrote it." In her own account, when she reached the death of Uncle Tom, "the whole vital force left her." The inspiration there left her, and the end of the story, the weaving together of all the loose ends of the plot, in the joining together almost by miracle the long separated, and the discovery of the relationships, is the conscious invention of the novelist. It would be perhaps going beyond the province of the critic to remark upon what the author considered the central power of the story, and its power to move the world, the faith of Uncle Tom in the Bible. This appeal to the emotion of millions of readers cannot, however, be overlooked. Many regard the book as effective in regions remote from our perplexities by reason of this grace. When the work was translated into Siamese, the perusal of it by one of the ladies of the court induced her to liberate all her slaves, men, women, and children, one hundred and thirty in all. "Hidden Perfume," for that was the English equivalent of her name, said she was wishful to be good like Harriet Beecher Stowe. And as to the standpoint of Uncle Tom and the Bible, nothing more significant can be cited than this passage from one of the latest writings of Heinrich Heine:-- "The reawakening of my religious feelings I owe to that holy book the Bible. Astonishing that after I have whirled about all my life over all the dance-floors of philosophy, and yielded myself to all the orgies of the intellect, and paid my addresses to all possible systems, without satisfaction like Messalina after a licentious night, I now find myself on the same standpoint where poor Uncle Tom stands,--on that of the Bible! I kneel down by my black brother in the same prayer! What a humiliation! With all my science I have come no further than the poor ignorant negro who has scarce learned to spell. Poor Tom, indeed, seems to have seen deeper things in the holy book than I.... Tom, perhaps, understands them better than I, because more flogging occurs in them; that is to say, those ceaseless blows of the whip which have aesthetically disgusted me in reading the Gospels and the Acts. But a poor negro slave reads with his back, and understands better than we do. But I, who used to make citations from Homer, now begin to quote the Bible as Uncle Tom does."