love
God,--that is that I love Christ,--that I find happiness in it, and
yet it is not that kind of comfort which would arise from free
communication of my wants and sorrows to a friend. I sometimes wish
that the Savior were visibly present in this world, that I might go to
him for a solution of some of my difficulties."

It will be seen from this passage that Harriet's storm-tossed soul was
settling down upon Christ as the nearest approach to God one could
gain in the darkness, and with this she taught herself to be content.
"So, after four years of struggling and suffering," writes her son,
"she returns to the place where she started from as a child of
thirteen. It has been like watching a ship with straining masts and
storm-beaten sails, buffeted by the waves, making for the harbor, and
coming at last to quiet anchorage." One cannot help reflecting how
different would have been her experience in the household of Dr.
Channing; but Dr. Beecher would sooner have trusted her in a den of
wolves.

Harriet was seventeen years old when, mentally, she reached her quiet
anchorage but, physically as might be expected, it was with a
constitution undermined and with health broken. "She had not grown to
be a strong woman," says Mrs. Fields; "the apparently healthy and
hearty child had been suffered to think and feel, to study and starve
(as we say), starve for relaxation, until she became a woman of much
suffering and many inadequacies of physical life." A year or two later
Harriet herself writes, "This inner world of mine has become worn out
and untenable," and again, "About half my time I am scarcely alive....
I have everything but good health.... Thought, intense emotional
thought, has been my disease."

At the end of six restless and stormy years, in 1832, Dr. Beecher
resigned his Boston pastorate to accept the presidency of Lane
Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Catharine and Harriet
accompanying the family with the purpose of establishing a high grade
school for young women. The plan was successfully carried out, and the
"Western Female Institute" marked a new stage in education west of the
Alleghenies. One of Harriet's early achievements at Cincinnati was the
publication of a text-book in geography, her first attempt at
authorship. She made her entry into the field of imaginative
literature by gaining a prize of $50 for a story printed in _The
Western Magazine_.

Her connection with the "Western Female Institu