In one of her early letters to Georgiana May, in 1833, she says, speaking of some relaxation which had come to her friend: "How good it would be for me to be put into a place which so breaks up and precludes thought. Thought, intense emotional thought, has been my disease. How much good it might do me to be where I could not but be thoughtless." This letter was written when she was twenty-two years old, and there had never been any respite in her life until those sweet Italian days of the winter of 1859 and '60.
It was only about a year later than the date of the above letter when the subject of slavery was first brought under her own observation during a brief visit in Kentucky. Her father had received a call in Boston, where he had been preaching for six years, to go to Cincinnati, which at that period was considered the far West and almost like banishment; but the call was one not to be refused; the need of such preaching as Dr. Beecher's being greatly felt at that distant post. About a year after their arrival an invitation came to Harriet to cross the river and to see something of Kentucky in company with a young friend. She found herself on the estate which was later known as Colonel Shelby's in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Her companion said later, in recalling their experience: "Harriet did not seem to notice anything in particular that happened, but sat most of the time as though abstracted in thought. When the negroes did funny things and cut up capers, she did not seem to pay the slightest attention to them. Afterwards, however, in reading Uncle Tom, I recognized scene after scene of that visit portrayed with the utmost fidelity, and knew at once where the material for that part of the story had been gathered."
To show how completely her "style" was herself, there is a passage from one of her early letters describing her experience at Niagara which burns with her own fire. "Let me tell you," she says, "if I can, what is unutterable.... I did not once think if it were high or low; whether it roared or didn't roar.... My mind whirled off, it seemed to me, in a new strange world.... That rainbow, breaking out, trembling, fading, and again coming like a beautiful spirit walking the waters. Oh, it is lovelier than it is great; it is like the Mind that made it; great, but so veiled in beauty that we gaze without terror. I felt as if I could have gone over with the waters; it would be so beautiful a death; there would be no fear in it. I felt the rock tremble under me with a sort of joy. I was so maddened I could have gone, too, if that had gone."