. It
is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely
feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet,
cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts.

A stronger smack of the soil is in the Negro melodies like _Uncle Ned_,
_O Susanna_, _Old Folks at Home_, _'Way Down South_, _Nelly was a
Lady_, _My Old Kentucky Home_, etc., which were the work, not of any
Southern poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa.,
and a resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the words and
music of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years
1847 to 1861. Taken together they form the most original and vital
addition which this country has made to the psalmody of the world, and
entitle Foster to the first rank among American song-writers.

As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the
plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings
of the Negroes in the "black belt" of the cotton-growing States. This
is the most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of
thousands of copies were sold in this country and in England, and some
forty translations were made into foreign tongues. In its dramatized
form it still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulating
libraries show that even now it is in greater demand than any other
single book. It did more than any other literary agency to rouse the
public conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery; more
even than Garrison's _Liberator_, more than the indignant poems of
Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It
presented the thing concretely and dramatically, and in particular 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