caricatures rather than realistic studies from the life. They are wrong and they are right. In reality, her characters are of the Dickens type, not photographs but paintings, idealizations of the truth, individuals intensely alive, yet drawn not from the life, but from the heightened images projected by their creator's imagination. They are therefore, in reality, like the characters of Dickens, mythological creations. Their author, a nunlike soul who has lived her whole life like an Emily Brontë in the seclusion of a little village, frail of body and delicate of health, over-imaginative, poetic, intense, creates in the quiet of her study her own world. Her materials are indeed scanty. She has, like the Brontë sisters, known little of the actual lives of men save as feminine talk of a small town has brought them to her. Her own heart, however, she has known, and her own dreamings and hopes and idealizings. With these she did her work. How far unconsciously she has written autobiography we may never know, and yet we know this, that the writer of fiction which is at all worth our study can have no secrets, and that inevitably he spins his web from his own heart. One need say Her characters mostly are unmarried women. Of the central figures in the twenty-four stories of "A New England Nun" nineteen are unmarried females and all but five of them are past

no more.

middle age. Or, to go still wider, there are in the book, leaving out merely incidental personages, sixty-seven characters, all but sixteen of whom are women, just half of them unmarried.

With such material there are infinite possibilities for depressed realism, and yet seldom are we sent away depressed. Almost all her stories, and some of them against the very protest of nature, end happily. The lover returns; the hapless maiden, pathetically patient through years of waiting, is married at last; justice is done and all is well. Even "Louisa" turns out happily. The Puritan conscience seems to consider it a duty to justify the ways of God to man. Unconsciously it is impressed with the idea that it is compelled to be a defender of God and to make life's plots come out in strict equity, with no injustice done. It is not too much to declare that no descendant of the New England Puritans can be an absolute realist.

Her favorite theme is revolt. Her tale opens with a study of repression. The central figure is bound by inherited forces which hold him as with steel. Sometimes the force is external, as in the case of Mrs. Penn in "The Revolt of 'Mother,'" but more often is it internal. On the surface of the life there is apparent serenity and reserve, but beneath there is an increasing fire. Then suddenly the barriers break and the strength of the recoil is in proportion

to the strength of the repression. Jane Field, once the barrier of her deception is down, spends the rest of her life in an insane iteration of her story of weakness; Selma Woodsum in the fierce impetuosity of her repentence can scarce be restrained from publishing in all the papers the story of her violation of her conscience. It is the central topic of "Jane Field"; it furnished the most gripping episode in "Pembroke"-the midnight coasting of Ephraim; it is the theme of four stories in "A New England Nun": "A Village Singer," "Sister Liddy," "Amanda and Love," "The Revolt of 'Mother'"; and it is central in many later stories like "Evelina's Garden," "The Givers," "A Slip of the Leash," "The Cloak Also," and "The Liar."

She does not present her material merely to entertain. In all her stories there is far more than the story. "The Revolt of 'Mother,'" for instance, might furnish a thesis on the homes of farmers, and yet no one may call it a purpose story. are times when the preacher that is within every descendant of New Englanders gets the better of the artist, but it is not often. In "The Amethyst Comb," for example, she can launch out like this:

There

When a man or a woman holds fast to youth, even if successfully, there is something of the pitiful and the tragic involved. It is the everlasting struggle of the soul to retain the joy of earth, whose fleeting

distinguishes it from heaven, and whose retention is not accomplished without an inner knowledge of its futility.

But more often these deeper truths of the story are gold that is far from the surface. Never does she present unlovely pictures simply to display them. Kipling's robust cynicism is in a world apart from hers. She thinks well of life; she hates oppression with her whole New England soul, and she sends her reader away always more kindly of heart, more tolerant, more neighborly in the deeper sense of the word.

Her kinship is with Hawthorne rather than with the realists. Both worked in the darker materials of New England Puritanism; both were romancers and poets, both were seekers after truth, and both were able to throw over their work a subtle atmosphere that was all their own. Hawthorne, writing as he did in the mid-nineteenth century, in the mild noon of later German romance, suffused his work with the rich glow that the later writer, bound by her more prosaic times, was unable to find; she, however, equal to him in her command of pathos and of emotional intensity, was able to surpass him in her command of gripping situation and her powers of compelling characterization. Of the generation born since the war she alone may be compared with this earliest depicter of the New England soul.

THE SHADOW OF LONGFELLOW

IN the third number of his "Hymns to the Night," Novalis records that once while he was weeping on the grave that had swallowed up his very life, "alone as no other mortal ever had been alone," suddenly there had come upon him a kind of shuddery twilight, a new atmosphere, that swept from him forever all desire for day. He stood in a new world, the transfigured world of night. Then through the mist there had appeared to him the glorified figure of his beloved who henceforth was to be an abiding presence, and from that moment he had had “an eternal, unchanging faith in the heaven of Night."

It is well known that the death of his betrothed, followed a few weeks later by the death of his favorite brother, made of Novalis a dreamer and a mystic. It swept away from him the boundaries between the worlds of matter and of spirit until he was no longer sure that there were boundaries at all. Henceforth for him the only reality was the unreal. There were to be for him no more sharp outlines; life was to move in a delicious mist, amid the half-seen and the dreamy, in a "holy, inex

210