Wherever
she found a fellow-mortal suffering trouble or dishonor, in spite of
hindrance her feet were turned that way. The genius of George Eliot
and the contrasting elements of her life and character drew Mrs. Stowe
to her side in sisterly solicitude. Her attitude, her sweetness, her
sincerity, could not fail to win the heart of George Eliot. They
became loving friends.
It was the same inborn sense of fraternity which led her, when a
child, on hearing of the death of Lord Byron, to go out into the
fields and fling herself, weeping, on the mounded hay, where she might
pray alone for his forgiveness and salvation. It is wonderful to
observe the influence of Byron upon that generation. It is on record
that when Tennyson, a boy of fifteen, heard some one say, "Byron is
dead," he thought the whole world at an end. "I thought," he said one
day, "everything was over and finished for every one; that nothing
else mattered. I remember that I went out alone and carved 'Byron is
dead' into the sandstone."
From this time forward Mrs. Stowe was chiefly bound up in her life and
labors at the South. In 1870, speaking of some literary work she was
proposing to herself, she said: "I am writing as a pure recreative
movement of mind, to divert myself from the stormy, unrestful
present.... I am being _chatelaine_ of a Florida farm. I have on
my mind the creation of a town on the banks of the St. John. The three
years since we came this side of the river have called into life and
growth a thousand peach-trees, a thousand orange-trees, about five
hundred lemons, and seven or eight hundred grapevines.
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