Stepping Heavenward was published toward the end of October, having appeared already as a serial in the Chicago Advance.  The first number of the serial was printed February 4, 1869.  The work was planned and the larger part of it composed during the winter and spring of 1867-8.  Referring more especially to this part of it, she once said to a friend:  “Every word of that book was a prayer, and seemed to come of itself.  I never knew how it was written, for my heart and hands were full of something else.”  By “something else” she had in mind the care of little Francis.  The ensuing summer the manuscript was taken with her to Dorset, carefully revised and finished before her return to the city.  In revising it she had the advantage of suggestions made by her friends, Miss Warner and Miss Lyman, both of them Christian ladies of the best culture and of rare good sense.

Notwithstanding the favor with which the work had been received as issued in The Advance, Mrs. Prentiss had great misgiving about its success—­a misgiving that had haunted her while engaged in writing it.  But all doubt on the subject was soon dispelled: 

The response to “Stepping Heavenward” was instant and general.  Others of her books were enjoyed, praised, laughed over, but this one was taken by tired hands into secret places, pored over by eyes dim with tears, and its lessons prayed out at many a Jabbok.  It was one of those books which sorrowing, Mary-like women read to each other, and which lured many a bustling Martha from the fretting of her care-cumbered life to ponder the new lesson of rest in toil.  It was one of those books of which people kept a lending copy, that they might enjoy the uninterrupted companionship of their own.  The circulation of the book was very large.  Not to speak of the thousands which were sold here, it went through numerous editions in England.  From England it passed into Australia.  It fell into the family of an afflicted Swiss pastor, and the comfort which it brought to that stricken household led to its translation into French by one of the pastor’s daughters.  It passed through I know not how many editions in French. [5] In Germany it came into the hands of an invalid lady who begged the privilege of translating it.  The first word of a favorite German hymn,

  “Heavenward doth our journey tend;
  We are strangers here on earth,”

furnished the title for the German translation—­“Himmelan.”  It appeared just after the French war, and went as a comforter into scores of the homes which war had desolated, and frequent testimony came back to her of the deep interest excited by the book, and of the affectionate gratitude called out toward the author.  She seemed to have inspired her translator, whose letters to her breathe the warmest affection and the most enthusiastic admiration.  It would be easy to fill up the time that remains with grateful testimonies to the work of this book.  From among a multitude