I had become so set in this feeling, that but for your last two
stories I should have given up hoping, and believed that all we were to
look for in the way of spontaneous growth were such languid, lifeless,
sexless creations as in the view of certain people constitute the chief
triumphs of a sister art as manifested among us.
But there is rich red blood in Hester, and the flavor of the sweet-fern
and the bayberry are not truer to the soil than the native sweetness of
our little Phoebe! The Yankee mind has for the most part budded and
flowered in pots of English earth, but you have fairly raised yours as a
seedling in the natural soil. My criticism has to stop here; the moment
a fresh mind takes in the elements of the common life about us and
transfigures them, I am contented to enjoy and admire, and let others
analyze. Otherwise I should be tempted to display my appreciating
sagacity in pointing out a hundred touches, transcriptions of nature, of
character, of sentiment, true as the daguerreotype, free as crayon
sketching, which arrested me even in the midst of the palpitating story.
Only one word, then, this: that the solid reality and homely
truthfulness of the actual and present part of the story are blended
with its weird and ghostly shadows with consummate skill and effect;
this was perhaps the special difficulty of the story.
I don't want to refuse anything you ask me to do. I shall come up, I
trust, about the 1st of June. I would look over the MS.
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