She dictated a large part of The minister's Wooing under a great pressure of mental excitement, and it was a relief to her to turn to the quiet story of the coast of Maine, which she loved so well.
In February, 1874, Mrs. Stowe received the following words from Mr. Whittier, which are very interesting in this connection:
When I am in the mood for thinking deeply I read “ The Minister's Wooing.” But “The Pearl of Orr's Island” is my favorite. It is the most charming New England idyl ever written.
The minister's Wooing was received with universal commendation from the first, and called forth the following appreciative words from the pen of Mr. James Russell Lowell:--
It has always seemed to us that the anti-slavery element in the two former novels by Mrs. Stowe stood in the way of a full appreciation of her remarkable genius, at least in her own country. It was so easy to account for the unexampled popularity of “ Uncle Tom” by attributing it to a cheap sympathy with sentimental philanthropy! As people began to recover from the first enchantment, they began also to resent it and to complain that a dose of that insane Garrison-root which takes the reason prisoner had been palmed upon them without their knowing it, and that their ordinary watergruel of fiction, thinned with sentiment and thickened with moral, had been hocussed with the bewildering hasheesh of Abolition. We had the advantage of reading that truly extraordinary book for the first time in Paris, long after the whirl of excitement produced by
