Religious Poems

By Harriet Beecher Stowe

"The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone"Poems such as "The Other World" "Mary at the Cross" and "The Secret" are spread across the pages of this collection by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Religious and spiritual, the poems reflect on how to live a godly life, discuss the afterlife, and the consequences of loss and tragedy. In much of her poetry, Stowe considers the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism, a relatively radical position for her day. -

• Language: English
• Publisher: SAGA Egmont
• Release date: Apr 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9788726891614

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was an American author and abolitionist. Born into the influential Beecher family, a mainstay of New England progressive political life, Stowe was raised in a devoutly Calvinist household. Educated in the Classics at the Hartford Female Seminary, Stowe moved to Cincinnati in 1832 to join her recently relocated family. There, she participated in literary and abolitionist societies while witnessing the prejudice and violence faced by the city’s African American population, many of whom had fled north as escaped slaves. Living in Brunswick, Maine with her husband and children, Stowe supported the Underground Railroad while criticizing the recently passed Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The following year, the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in The National Era, a prominent abolitionist newspaper. Published in book form in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate international success, serving as a crucial catalyst for the spread of abolitionist sentiment around the United States in the leadup to the Civil War. She spent the rest of her life between Florida and Connecticut working as a writer, editor, and activist for married women’s rights.

Book preview

THE CHARMER.

"Socrates. However, you and Simmias appear to me as if you wished to sift this subject more thoroughly, and to be afraid, like children, lest, on the soul's departure from the body, winds should blow it away.

"Upon this Cebes said, 'Endeavor to teach us better, Socrates. Perhaps there is a childish spirit in our breast that has such a dread. Let us endeavor to persuade him not to be afraid of death, as of hobgoblins.'

"'But you must charm him every day,' said Socrates, 'until you have quieted his fears.'

"'But whence, O Socrates,' he said, 'can we procure a skilful charmer for such a case, now you are about to leave us.'

'Greece is wide, Cebes,' he said, 'and in it surely there are skilful men; and there are many barbarous nations, all of which you should search, seeking such a charmer, sparing neither money nor toil.'—Last words of Socrates, as narrated by Plato in the Phædo.

WE need that charmer, for our hearts are sore

With longings for the things that may not be,

Faint for the friends that shall return no more,

Dark with distrust, or wrung with agony.

"What is this life? and what to us is death?

Whence came we? whither go? and where are those

Who, in a moment stricken from our side,

Passed to that land of shadow and repose?

"And are they all dust? and dust must we become?

Or are they living in some unknown clime?

Shall we regain them in that far-off home,

And live anew beyond the waves of time?

"O man divine! on thee our souls have hung;

Thou wert our teacher in these questions high;

But ah! this day divides thee from our side,

And veils in dust thy kindly-guiding eye.

"Where is that Charmer whom thou bidst us