Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

To Mrs. S. B. Shaw.

Do you know that Harriet Hosmer, daughter of a physician in Watertown, has produced a remarkably good piece of statuary? It is a bust of Vesper, the Evening Star. I never saw a tender, happy drowsiness so well expressed. A star shining on her forehead, and beneath her breast lies the crescent moon. Her graceful hair is intertwined with capsules of the poppy. It is cut with great delicacy and precision, and the flesh seems to me very flesh-like. The poetic conception is her own, and the workmanship is all her own. A man worked upon it a day and a half, to [69] chip off large bits of marble; but she did not venture to have him go within several inches of the surface she intended to work. Miss Hosmer is going to Rome in October, accompanied by her father, a plain, sensible man, of competent property. She expects to remain in Italy three years, with the view of becoming a sculptor by profession.

Mrs. Stowe's truly great work, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” has also done much to command respect for the faculties of woman. Whittier has poured forth verses upon it; Horace Mann has eulogized it in Congress; Lord Morpeth is carried away with it; the music stores are full of pieces of music suggested by its different scenes; somebody is going to dramatize it; and 100,000 copies sold in little more than six months! Never did any American work have such success! The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law roused her up to write it. Behold how “God makes the wrath of man to praise him!” Charles Sumner has made a magnificent speech in Congress against the Fugitive Slave Law. How thankful I was for it! God bless him! The Republican party don't know how to appreciate his honesty and moral courage. They think he makes a mistake in speaking the truth, and does it because he don't know any better. They do not perceive how immeasurably superior his straightforwardness is to their crookedness. History will do him justice.

It is really droll to see in what different states of mind people read “Uncle Tom.” Mr. Pierce, Senator from Maryland, read it lately, and when he came to the sale of “Uncle Tom,” he exclaimed with great emotion, “Here's a writer that knows how to sympathize with the South! I could fall down at the feet [70] of that woman! She knows how to feel for a man when he is obliged to sell a good honest slave!” In his view the book was intended as a balsam for bereaved slave-holders.