Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/398

 382 The Short Story the islands of Lake Superior. She had been reading Harte. Later, in the South, she was stirred by the desolation and the poverty wrought by the war, and now with her heart in her work she wrote the first post-bellum Southern short stories founded upon the contrast between what was and what had been. And still later in Italy she caught again the soul of a people and wrought it into the tales to be collected under the title The Front Yard. With each volume there had been an increase in definiteness, in picturesque characterization, in dramatic effect. She worked without dialect and she threw over her work the soft evening light, yet was she a realist, as Harte never was, and imlike him too she worked always with insight and sympathy. Stories like her The Front Yard are constructed of the materials of life itself. One cannot forget them. A transition from another source is to be found in the stories of Sarah Ome Jewett (i 849-1 909), who also stands on the border line between the real and the romantic. She was affected not at all by Harte, but by Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke. In her Deephaven (1877) she struck the new note of the decade, concreteness, geographical locality made so definite and so minutely real that it may be reckoned with as one of the characters in the story. Rose Terry Cooke had written of New England ; Miss Jewett wrote of Deephaven, which was Berwick, Maine, her native town. Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Cooke wrote of the New England flood tide; Miss Jewett wrote of the ebb, not despairingly like Miss Wilkins and the depressed realists, but reverently and gently. Over all her work is the hint of a glory departed, that Irving-hke atmosphere which is the soul of romance. She delighted in decaying old seaports with their legends of other and better days, of old sea captains mellow and reminiscent, and of dear old ladies serene in spite of the buffets of time. Her knowledge of her materials was intimate and thorough. All through her girlhood she had ridden much with her father, a country doctor, as be went his daily round among his patients. From him she learned the soul of the region, and she sympa- thized with it, and later she interpreted it in story after stoiy based accurately upon what she knew. Unlike Mrs. Cooke, she came late enough to avoid the mid-century gush of senti-