Harriet Stowe - My Wife and I. Harry Henderson's History

This work had been going on insensibly in my head during my college life, notwithstanding the loyalty of my heart. During those years I had learned to associate the Bible with the most sacred memories of home, with the dearest loves of home life. It was woven with remembrances of daily gatherings around the family altar, with scenes of deepest emotion when I had seen my father and mother fly to its shelter and rest upon its promises. There were passages that never recurred to me except with the sound of my father's vibrating voice, penetrating their words with a never dying power. The Bible was to me like a father and a mother, and the doubts, and queries, the respectful suggestions of incredulity, the mildly suggestive abatements of its authority, which met me, now here and now there, in all the course of my readings and studies, were as painful to me as reflections cast on my father's probity or my mother's honor.

I would not listen to them, I would not give them voice, I smothered them in the deepest recesses of my heart, while meantime the daily pressure that came on me in the studies and requirements of college life left me neither leisure nor inclination to pursue the researches that should clear them up.

To be sure, nothing is so important as the soul – nothing is of so much moment as religion, and the question "Is this God's book or is it not?" is the question of questions. It underlies all things, and he who is wise would drop all other things and undergo any toil and make any studies that should fit him to judge understandingly on this point. But I speak from experience when I say that the course of study in christian America is so arranged that a boy, from the grammar school upward till he graduates, is so fully pressed and overladen with all other studies that there is no probability that he will find the time or the inclination for such investigation.

In most cases he will do just what I did, throw himself upon the studies proposed to him, work enough to meet the demands of the hour, and put off the acquisition of that more important knowledge to an indefinite future, and sigh, and go backward in his faith.

But without faith or with a faith trembling and uncertain, how is a man to turn his back on the world that is before him – the world that he can see, hear, touch and taste – to work for the world that is unseen and eternal?

I will not repeat the flattering words that often fell on my ear and said to me, "You can make your way anywhere; you can be anything you please." And then there were voices that said in my heart, "I may have wealth, and with it means of power, of culture, of taste, of luxury. If I only set out for that, I may get it." And then, in contrast, came that life I had seen my father live, in its grand simplicity, in its enthusiastic sincerity, in its exulting sense of joy in what he was doing, down to the last mortal moment, and I wished, oh, how fervently! that I could believe as he did. But to be a minister merely from a sense of duty – to bear the burden of poverty with no perception of the unspeakable riches which Christ hath placed therein – who would not shrink from a life so grating and so cold? To choose the ministry as a pedestal for oratory and self-display and poetic religious sentiment, and thus to attain distinction and easy position, and the command of fashionable luxury, seemed to me a temptation to desecration still more terrible, and I dreaded the hour which should close my college life and make a decision inevitable.

It was with a sober and sad heart that I closed my college course and parted from class-mates – jolly fellows with whom had rolled away the four best years of my life – years that as one goes on afterwards in age look brighter and brighter in the distance. It was a lonesome and pokerish operation to dismantle the room that had long been my home, to bargain away my furniture, pack my books, and bid a final farewell to all the old quiddities and oddities that I had grown attached to in the quaint little village. The parting from Alma Mater is a second leaving of home – and this time for the great world. There is no staving off the battle of life now – the tents are struck, the camp-fires put out, and one must be on the march.

My coming back to my native town was an event of public notoriety. I had won laurels, and as I was the village property, my laurels were duly commented on and properly appreciated. Highland was one of those thrifty Yankee settlements where every house seems to speak the people so well-to-do, and so careful, and progressive in all the means of material comfort. There was not a house in it that was not in a sort of healthy, growing state, receiving, from time to time, some accession that showed that the Yankee aspiration was busy, stretching and enlarging. This had a new bay-window, and that had a new veranda; the other, new, tight, white picket fences all round the yard. Others rejoiced in a fresh coat of paint. But all were alive, and apparently self-repairing. There was to every house the thrifty wood-pile, seasoning for winter; the clean garden, with its wealth of fruit and its gay borders of flowers; and every new kind of flower, and every choice new fruit, found somewhere a patron who was trying a hand at it.

Highland was a place worth living in just for its scenery. It was at that precise point of the country where the hills are inspiriting, vivacious, reminding one of the Psalm, – "The little hills rejoice on every side!" Mountains are grand, but they also are dreary. For a near prospect they overpower too much, they shut out the sun, they have savage propensities, untamable by man, shown once in a while in land-slides and freshets; but these half-grown hills uplift one like waves of the sea. In summer they are wonderful in all possible shades of greenness; in autumn they are like a mystical rainbow – an ocean of waves, flamboyant with every wonderful device of color; and even when the leaves are gone, in November, and nothing left but the bristling steel-blue outlines of trees, there is a wonderful purple haze, a veil of dreamy softness, around them, that makes you think you never saw them so beautiful.

So I said to myself, as I came rambling over hill and dale back to the old homestead, and met my mother's bright face of welcome at the door. I was the hero of the hour at home, and everything had been prepared to make me welcome. My brother, who kept the homestead, had relinquished the prospect of a college life, and devoted himself to farming, but looked on me as the most favored of mortals in the attainments I had made. His young wife and growing family of children clustered around my mother and leaned on her experience; and as every one in the little village knew and loved her, there was a general felicitation and congratulation on the event of my return and my honors.

"See him in his father's pulpit afore long," said Deacon Manning, who called the first evening to pay his respects; "better try his hand at the weekly prayer meeting, and stir us up a bit."

"I think, Deacon," said I, "I shall have to be one of those that learn in silence, awhile longer. I may come to be taught, but I certainly cannot teach."

"Well, now, that's modest for a young fellow that's just been through college! They commonly are as feathery and highflying as a this year's rooster, and ready to crow whether their voice breaks or not," said the deacon. "'Learn in silence!' Well, that 'ere beats all for a young man!"

I thought to myself that the good deacon little knew the lack of faith that was covered by my humility.

Since my father's death, my mother had made her home with my Uncle Jacob, her health was delicate, and she preferred to enjoy the honors of a grandmother at a little distance. My Uncle Jacob had no children. Aunt Polly, his wife, was just the softest, sleekest, most domestic dove of a woman whose wings were ever covered with silver. I always think of her in some soft, pearly silk, with a filmy cap, and a half-handkerchief crossed over a gentle, motherly bosom, soft moving, soft speaking, but with a pair of bright, hazel eyes, keen as arrows to send their glances into every place in her dominions. Let anybody try sending in a false account to Aunt Polly, and they will see that the brightness of her eyes was not merely for ornament. Yet everything she put her hand to went so exactly, so easily, you would have said those eyes were made for nothing but reading, for which Aunt Polly had a great taste, and for which she found abundance of leisure.