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fully recognize the joy of Marcellus exiled, the secret ennui of Caesar with a senate at his heels.
Thus it is in daily life — that is, in nature; and yet many still think it a defect in a story if it leaves a single moral influence to be worked out by the meditation of the reader.
On my lending to an intelligent young woman, the other day, Mr. Hamlin Garland's remarkable volume, Main-travelled roads, she returned it with the remark that she greatly admired all the stories except the first, which seemed to her immoral.
It closed, indeed, as she justly pointed out, with a striking scene in which a long-absent lover carries off the wife and child of a successful but unworthy rival, and the tale ends with the words: “The sun shone on the dazzling, rustling wheat; the fathomless sky as a sea bent over them, and the world lay before them.”
But when I pointed out to her, what one would think must be clear at a glance to every reader, that behind this momentary gleam of beauty lay an absolutely hopeless future; that though the impulse of action was wholly generous, and not even passional, yet Nemesis was close behind; and that the mere fact of the woman's carrying another man's baby in her arms would prevent
New York, Harper and Brothers, 1897.
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