it made the odious Fugitive Slave Law forever impossible to enforce.  It was useless for the defenders of slavery to protest that the picture was exaggerated, and that planters like Legree were the exception.  The system under which such brutalities could happen, and did sometimes happen, was doomed.  It is easy now to point out defects of taste and art in this masterpiece, to show that the tone is occasionally melodramatic, that some of the characters are conventional, and that the literary execution is in parts feeble and in others coarse.  In spite of all, it remains true that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a great book, the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and uttering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the heart of the nation and of the world.  Mrs. Stowe never repeated her first success.  Some of her novels of New England life, such as the Minister’s Wooing, 1859, and the Pearl of Orr’s Island, 1862, have a mild kind of interest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial ways and traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like Pink and White Tyranny and My Wife and I, are really beneath criticism.

There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with Mrs. Stowe:  Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as “the Hemans of America,” but now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival, of New Haven, a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler poems, still in circulation, such as To Seneca Lake and the Coral Grove.  Another Hartford poet, Brainard—­already spoken of as an early friend of Whittier—­died young, leaving a few pieces which show that his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine, but had received little cultivation.  A much younger writer than either of these, Donald G. Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our literature, by virtue of his charmingly written Reveries of a Bachelor, 1850, and Dream Life, 1852, stories which sketch themselves out in a series of reminiscences and lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life which is characteristic of youth.  But, upon the whole, the most important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the literary stock of America was the Beecher family.  Lyman Beecher had been an influential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy defender of orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism.  Of his numerous sons and daughters, all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and independence, the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn.  Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to give more than his spare moments to general literature.  His sermons, lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the large,