Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 by Harriet Beecher Stowe
page 47 of 409 (11%)
page 47 of 409 (11%)
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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 |
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