conceived and
executed. Catherine certainly, for one, has no profit in the
development of Robert's improved gospel. The "stray sheep," we think,
has by no means always the best of the argument, and her story is
really a sadder, more testing one than his. Though both alike, we
admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the eternal moral charm of
"renunciation," something even of the thirst for martyrdom, for those
wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation, eternal also in
their aesthetic charm.

These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting,
which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in rapid
sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by patient
analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most successful in
female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable
virility and grasp and scientific firmness. This indispensable
intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George
Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape
background, for the most part English. Mrs. Ward has been a true
disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really undergone its
influence. Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere background; its
spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons, as understood by
the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at work, in the
formation, in the refining, of character. It has been a stormy day:--

"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the
white mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper
end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in
air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream wavering
[64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling
rain-clouds."

There is surely something of "natural magic" in that! The wilder
capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story of
a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more
imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general
tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of
sensation--witness the ghost, in which the average human susceptibility
to supernatural terrors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. Wendover,
and the love-scene with Madame de Netteville, which, like those other
exciting passages, really furthers the development of the proper
ethical interests of the book. The Oxf