Charles E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her letters and journals by her son Charles Edward Stowe, Chapter 19: the Byron controversy, 1869-1870., page 450

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19th-Century American

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Table of Contents:

Introductory statement.

List of illustrations.

Sunday evening .

Chapter 19 : the Byron controversy, 1869 - 1870 .

Novels, stories, sketches, and poems, by Harriet Beecher Stowe .

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[450] vice are the result of a taint of constitutional insanity. This has always seemed to me the only way of accounting for instances of utterly motiveless and abnormal wickedness and cruelty. These, my first impressions, were expressed in the hasty note written at the time:

London, November 5, 1856.

Dearest friend,--I return these. They have held mine eyes waking. How strange! How unaccountable! Have you ever subjected the facts to the judgment of a medical man, learned in nervous pathology? Is it not insanity?

Great wits to madness nearly are allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

But my purpose to-night is not to write to you fully what I think of this matter. I am going to write to you from Paris more at leisure.

(The rest of the letter was taken up in the final details of a charity in which Lady Byron had been engaged with me in assisting an unfortunate artist. It concludes thus:)

I write now in all haste, en route for Paris. As to America, all is not lost yet. Farewell. I love you, my dear friend, as never before, with an intense feeling that I cannot easily express. God bless you.

H. B. S.

The next letter is as follows:--

Paris, December 17, 1856.

Dear Lady Byron,--The Kansas Committee have written me a letter desiring me to express to Miss their gratitude for the five pounds she sent them. I

Houghton, Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1889.

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