Excerpt from Minister's Wooing Save for the random stories afterward collected in The Mayflower, Mrs. Stowe had been kwn only as a vel ist who had brought a great story-telling power to bear upon the tremendous moral issues involved in the conflict between freedom and slavery in the arena Of human indus try. She had gone but a short way in the serial publica tion Of The Minister's Wooing, which was begun in The Atlantic Monthly for December, 1858, before it was per ceived that she was to take rank also as an artist dealing with material in a peculiar sense her own, and that the strong moral impulse which had been behind Uncle Tom and Brad was to urge her into the field of, religious con fliet. The Minister's Wooing was as forcible a presenta tion Of the struggle within the human soul for freedom under the historic conditions Of New England life, as Uncle Tom had been of the more dramatic contest going on upon the broad area of the United States; and it had this added advantage, that its author was entirely at home in the scenes she drew, whereas in Uncle Tom her graphic power acted largely upon hearsay evidence. Miss Ophelia in the earlier book had intimated what she might do when she came to deal more exclusively with New England material, and there was the liveliest expectation Of a genu ine home story as the vel opened in the pages of The Atlantic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.