visitor but as a native, now became himself a visiting enthusiast for
the "high trails" and let himself be roused by a fervor sufficiently
like that from which he had earlier dissented. In his different way he
was as hungry for new lands as his father had been before him. Looking
upon local color as the end--when it is more accurately the
beginning--of fiction, he felt that he had exhausted his old community
and must move on to fresher pastures.

Here the prime fallacy of his school misled him: he believed that if he
had represented the types and scenes of his particular region once he
had done all he could, when of course had he let imagination serve him
he might have found in that microcosm as many passions and tragedies and
joys as he or any novelist could have needed for a lifetime. Here, too,
the prime penalty of his school overtook him: he came to lay so much
emphasis upon outward manners that he let his plots and characters fall
into routine and formula. The novels of his middle period--such as _Her
Mountain Lover_, _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, _Hester_, _The
Light of the Star_, _Cavanagh, Forest Ranger_--too frequently recur to
the romantic theme of a love uniting some powerful, uneducated
frontiersman and some girl from a politer neighborhood. Pioneer and lady
are always almost the same pair in varying costumes; the stories harp
upon the praise of plains and mountains and the scorn of cities and
civilization. These romances, much value as they have as documents and
will long continue to have, must be said to exhibit the frontier as
self-conscious, obstreperous, given to insisting upon its difference
from the rest of the world. In ordinary human intercourse such
insistence eventually becomes tiresome; in literature no less than in
life there is a time to remember local traits and a time to forget them
in concerns more universal.