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Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1, a non-fiction book by Harriet Beecher Stowe |
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Public Meeting In Dundee--April 22 |
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_ MR. GILFILLAN, who was received with great applause, said he had been intrusted by the Committee of the Ladies' Antislavery Association to present the following address to Mrs. Stowe, which he would read to the meeting:-- "MADAM: We, the ladies of the Dundee Antislavery Association, desire to add our feeble voices to the acclamations of a world, conscious that your fame and character need no testimony from us. We are less anxious to honor you than to prove that our appreciation and respect are no less sincere and no less profound than those of the millions in other places and other lands, whom you have instructed, improved, delighted, and thrilled. We beg permission to lay before you the expressions of a gratitude and an enthusiasm in some measure commensurate with your transcendent literary merit and moral worth. We congratulate you on the success of the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of your genius, a success altogether unparalleled, and in all probability never to be paralleled in the history of literature. We congratulate you still more warmly on that nobility and benevolence of nature which made you from childhood the friend of the unhappy slave, and led you to accumulate unconsciously the materials for the immortal tale of Uncle Tom's Cabin. We congratulate you in having in that tale supported with matchless eloquence and pathos the cause of the crushed, the forgotten, the injured, of those who had no help of man at all, and who had even been blasphemously taught by professed ministers of the gospel of mercy that Heaven too was opposed to their liberation, and had blotted them out from the catalogue of man. We recognize, too, with delight, the spirit of enlightened and evangelical piety which breathes through your work, and serves to confute the calumny that none but infidels are interested in the cause of abolition--a calumny which cuts at Christianity with a yet sharper edge than at abolition, but which you have proved to be a foul and malignant falsehood. We congratulate you not only on the richness of the laurels which you have won, but on the dignity, the meekness, and the magnanimity with which these laurels have been worn. We hail in you our most gifted sister in the great cause of liberty--we bid you warmly welcome to our city, and we pray Almighty God, the God of the oppressed, to pour his selectest blessings on your head, and to spare your invaluable life, till yours, and ours, and others' efforts for the cause of abolition are crowned with success, and till the shouts of a universal jubilee shall proclaim that in all quarters of the globe the African is free." The address was handed to Mrs. Stowe amid great applause. MR. GILFILLAN continued: "In addition to the address which I have now read, I have been requested to add a few remarks; and in making these I cannot but congratulate Dundee on the fact that Mrs. Stowe has visited it, and that she has had a reception worthy of her distinguished merits. [Applause.] It is not Dundee alone that is present here to-night: it is Forfarshire, Fifeshire, and I may also add, Perthshire:--that are here to do honor to themselves in doing honor to our illustrious guest. [Cheers.] There are assembled here representatives of the general feeling that boils in the whole land--not from our streets alone, but from our country valleys--from our glens and our mountains O! I wish that Mrs. Stowe would but spare time to go herself and study that enthusiasm amid its own mountain recesses, amid the uplands and the friths, and the wild solitudes of our own unconquered and unconquerable land. She would see scenery there worthy of that pencil which has painted so powerfully the glories of the Mississippi; ay, and she would find her name known and reverenced in every hamlet, and see copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the shepherd's shieling, beside Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the Life of Sir William Wallace, Rob Roy, and the Gaelic Bible. I saw copies of it carried by travellers last autumn among the gloomy grandeurs of Glencoe, and, as Coleridge once said when he saw Thomson's Seasons lying in a Welsh wayside inn, 'That is true fame,' I thought this was fame truer still. [Applause.] It is too late in the day to criticize Uncle Tom's Cabin, or to speculate on its unprecedented history--a history which seems absolutely magical. Why, you are reminded of Aladdin's lamp, and of the palace that was reared by genii in one night. Mrs. Stowe's genius has done a greater wonder than this--it has reared in a marvellously short time a structure which, unlike that Arabian fabric, is a reality, and shall last forever. [Applause.] She must not be allowed, to depreciate herself, and to call her glorious book a mere 'bubble.' Such a bubble there never was before. I wish we had ten thousand such bubbles. [Applause.] If it had been a bubble it would have broken long ago. 'Man,' says Jeremy Taylor, 'is a bubble.' Yea, but he is an immortal one. And such an immortal bubble is Uncle Tom's Cabin; it can only with man expire; and yet a year ago not ten individuals in this vast assembly had ever heard of its author's name. [Applause.] At its artistic merits we may well marvel--to find in a small volume the descriptive power of a Scott, the humor of a Dickens, the keen, observing glance of a Thackeray, the pathos of a Richardson or Mackenzie, combined with qualities of earnestness, simplicity, humanity, and womanhood peculiar to the author herself. But there are three things which, strike me as peculiarly remarkable about Uncle Tom's Cabin: it is the work of an American--of a woman--and of an evangelical Christian. [Cheers.] We have long been accustomed to despise American literature--I mean as compared with our own. I have heard eminent _litterateurs_ say, 'Pshaw! the Americans have no national literature.' It was thought that they lived entirely on plunder--the plunder of poor slaves, and of poor British authors. [Loud cheers.] Their own works, when, they came among us, were treated either with contempt or with patronizing wonder--yes, the 'Sketch Book' was a very good book to be an American's. To parody two lines of Pope, we Admired such wisdom in a Yankee shape, [Loud cheers.] And yet, strange to tell, not only of late have we been almost deluged with editions of new and excellent American writers, but the most popular book of the century has appeared on the west side of the Atlantic. Let us hear no more of the poverty of American brains, or the barrenness of American literature. Had it produced only Uncle Tom's Cabin, it had evaded contempt just as certainly as Don Quixote, had there been no other product of the Spanish mind, would have rendered it forever illustrious. It is the work of a woman, too! None but a woman could have written it. There are in the human mind springs at once delicate and deep, which only the female genius can understand, or the female finger touch. Who but a female could have created the gentle Eva, painted the capricious and selfish Marie St. Clair, or turned loose a Topsy upon the wondering world? [Loud and continued cheering.] And it is to my mind exceedingly delightful, and it must be humiliating to our opponents, to remember that the severest stroke to American slavery has been given by a woman's hand. [Loud cheers.] It was the smooth stone from the brook which, sent from the hand of a youthful David, overthrew Goliath of Gath; but I am less reminded of this than of another incident in Scripture history. When the robber and oppressor of Israel, Abimelech, who had slain his brethren, was rushing against a tower, whither his enemies had fled, we are told that 'a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech's head, and all to break his skull,' and that he cried hastily to the young man, his armor-bearer, and said unto him, 'Draw thy sword, and slay me, that men say not of me, A woman slew him.' It is a parable of our present position. Mrs. Stowe has thrown a piece of millstone, sharp and strong, at the skull of the giant abomination of her country; he is reeling in his death pangs, and, in the fury of his despair and shame, is crying, but crying in vain, 'Say not, A woman slew me!' [Applause.] But the world shall say, 'A woman slew him,' or, at least, 'gave him the first blow, and drove him to despair and suicide.' [Cheers.] Lastly, it is the work of an evangelical Christian; and the piety of the book has greatly contributed to its power. It has forever wiped away the vile calumny, that all who love their African brother hate their God and Savior. I look, indeed, on Mrs. Stowe's volume, not only as a noble contribution to the cause of emancipation, but to the general cause of Christianity. It is an olive leaf in a dove's mouth, testifying that the waters of scepticism, which have rolled more fearfully far in America than here,--and no wonder, if the Christianity of America in general is a slaveholding, man-stealing, soul-murdering Christianity--that they are abating, and that genuine liberty and evangelical religion are soon to clasp hands, and to smile in unison on the ransomed, regenerated, and truly 'United States.' [Loud and reiterated applause.]" _ |
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