South and West; and yet they have their formulas: how a stubborn pride
worthy of some supreme cause holds an elderly Yankee to a petty,
obstinate course until grievous calamities ensue; how a rural wife,
neglected and overworked by her husband, rises in revolt against the
treadmill of her dull tasks and startles him into comprehension and
awkward consideration; how the remnant of some once prosperous family
puts into the labor of keeping up appearances an amount of effort which,
otherwise expended, might restore the family fortunes; how neighbors
lock horns in the ruthless litigation which in New England corresponds
to the vendettas of Kentucky and how they are reconciled eventually by
sentiment in one guise or another; how a young girl--there are no Tom
Joneses and few Hamlets in this womanly universe--grows up bright and
sensitive as a flower and suffers from the hard, stiff frame of pious
poverty; how a superb heroism springs out of a narrow life, expressing
itself in some act of pitiful surrender and veiling the deed under an
even more pitiful inarticulateness.

The cities of New England have been almost passed over by the local
colorists; Boston, the capital of the Puritans, has singularly to depend
upon the older Holmes or the visiting Howells of Ohio for its reputation
in fiction. Ever since Hawthorne, the romancers and novelists of his
native province have taken, one may say, to the fields, where they have
worked much in the mood of Rose Terry Cooke, who called her best
collection of stories _Huckleberries_ to emphasize what she thought a
true resemblance between the crops and characters of New
England--"hardy, sweet yet spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with
calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil, barren pastures, gray and
rocky hillsides, yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources."

Alas that as time goes on the issues of such art seem less fruitful than