II. of the Twice-Told Tales.] But the most perfect
example of his sympathy with this sorrow of widowhood is that brief,
concentrated, and seemingly slight tale, "The Wives of the Dead,"
[Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] than which
I know of nothing more touching and true, more exquisitely proportioned
and dramatically wrought out among all English tales of the same scope
and length. It pictures the emotions of "two young and comely women,"
the "recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and a landsman; and two
successive days had brought tidings of the death of each, by the chances
of Canadian warfare and the tempestuous Atlantic." The action occupies
the night after the news, and turns upon the fact that each sister is
roused, unknown to the other, at different hours, to be told that the
report about her husband is false. One cannot give its beauty without
the whole, more than one can separate the dewdrop from the morning-glory
without losing the effect they make together. It is a complete
presentment, in little, of all that dwells in widowhood. One sentence I
may remind the reader of, nevertheless: "Her face was turned partly inward
to the pillow, and had been hidden there to weep; but a look of motionless
contentment was now visible upon it, as if her heart, like a deep lake,
had grown calm because its dead had sunk down so far within it." Even as
his widowed mother's face looked, to the true-souled boy, when they dwelt
there together in the forest of pines, beside the placid lake!
Yet clear and searching as must then have been his perceptions, he had
not always formulated them or made them his chief concern.
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