st intention to express to him those various phases of
weary, restless wandering desire proper to an earnest people whose
traditional faith has been broken up.... Inquirers were constantly
coming with every imaginable theological problem ... he was to be seen
all day talking with whoever would talk ... till an hour or two before
the time (of service), when he would rush up to his study; ... just as
the last stroke of the bell was dying away, he would emerge from the
study with his coat very much awry, come down stairs like a hurricane,
stand impatiently protesting while female hands that ever lay in wait
adjusted his cravat and settled his collar ... and hooking wife or
daughter like a satchel on his arm, away he would start on such a race
through the streets as left neither brain nor breath till the church
was gained." Such, very much abbreviated, is Mrs. Stowe's portrait of
her father at this period. It is a good example of her power of
delineation; but what a life was this for a half distracted girl like
Harriet! Much better for her would have been the old serene, peaceful,
quiet life of Litchfield.

She had several kinds of religious trouble. It troubled her that in
the book of Job, God should seem "to have stripped a dependent
creature of all that renders life desirable, and then to have answered
his complaints from the whirlwind, and, instead of showing mercy and
pity, to have overwhelmed him with a display of his power and
justice." It troubled her that when she allowed herself to take a
milder view of deity, "I feel," she says, "less fear of God and, in
view of sin, I feel only a sensation of grief." This was an alarming
decline. It troubled her again that she loved literature, whereas she
ought only to care for religion. She writes to Edward: "You speak of
your predilections for literature being a snare to you. I have found
it so myself." Evidently, as she has before said, she was beset behind
and before. What was perhaps worst of all, the heavens seemed closed
to her. Calvinism was pure agnosticism; and she had been educated a
Calvinist. There was no 'imminent God,' in all and through all, for
Calvinism; that came in with Transcendentalism, a form of thought
which never seems to have touched Mrs. Stowe. She seems always to
have felt, as at this period she writes Edward, that "still, after
all, God is a being afar off." Nevertheless, there was Christ, but
Christ at this period was also afar off: "I feel that I