...the parsonage. But where no abstract idea governs her she can be direct, accurate, and convincing. The earlier chapters of must be counted, as Whittier thought, among the purest, truest idyls of New England . It is harder now to agree with Lowell in placing first among her novels, and yet no other imaginative treatment so well sets forth the strange, dusky old Puritan world of the later eighteenth cen...