“Wise, clear, and kindly,”—one must echo the verdict of Margaret Fuller on our gentle pioneer in native fiction; we may look back with pride on her “speech moderate and sane, but never palsied by fear or skeptical caution”; on herself, “a fine example of the independent and beneficent existence that intellect and character can give to woman.” The least studied among her pathetic scenes are admirable; and she displays some healthy humor, though not as much as her charming letters indicate that she possessed. A recent writer has ranked her work in one respect above that of Cooper, considering it more calculated to effect “the emancipation of the American mind from foreign types.” Miss Sedgwick, past threescore, was still in the literary harness, when the woman who was destined to bring the novel of New England to a fuller development reached fame at a bound with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” At last the artist’s instinct and the purpose of the reformer were fused, as far as they are capable of fusion, in a story that still holds its reader, whether passive or protesting, with the grip of the master-hand. The inborn powers of Mrs. Stowe were fortunately developed in a home atmosphere that supplied deficiencies in training. Fate was kind in providing occasional stimulants for the feminine mind, though an adequate and regular supply was customarily withheld. Miss Sedgwick attributes an especial quickening force to the valuable selections read aloud by her father to his family; Miss Francis, as we have seen, owed much to the conversation of her brother. To Harriet Beecher was granted, outside her inspiring home circle, an extra stimulus, in the early influence of the enthusiastic teacher whose portrait she has given us in the Jonathan Rossiter of “Oldtown Folks.” A close knowledge of Scott’s novels from her girlhood had its effect in shaping her methods of narration. She knew her Bible—perpetual fountain feeding the noblest streams of English literature—as Ruskin knew his. Residence for years near the Ohio border had familiarized her with some of the darkest aspects of slavery; so that when the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law roused her to the task of exhibiting the system in operation, she was as fully prepared to execute that task as a woman of New England birth and traditions well could be. Since the war, Southern writers, producing with the ease of intimacy works steeped in the spirit of the South, have taught us much concerning negro character and manners, and have accustomed us to an accurate reproduction of dialect. The sublimity of Uncle Tom has been tried by the reality of the not less lovable Uncle Remus. But whatever blemishes or extravagances may appear to a critical eye in the great anti-slavery novel, it still beats with that intense life which nearly forty years ago awoke a deep responsive thrill in the repressed heart of the North. We are at present chiefly concerned with its immense practical success. It was a “shot heard round the world.”