nce. It is something like the solution
which Goethe imagines for Faust, and perhaps no other is imaginable.
In contriving it, Mr. Parker indulges the weaker brethren with an
abundance of accident and a luxury of catastrophe, which the reader
interested in the psychology of the story may take as little account of
as he likes. Without so much of them he might have made a
sculpturesque romance as clearly and nobly definite as "The Scarlet
Letter"; with them he has made a most picturesque romantic novel. His
work, as I began by saying, or hinting, is the work of a poet, in
conception, and I wish that in some details of diction it were as elect
as the author's verse is. But one must not expect everything; and in
what it is, "The Right of Way" satisfies a reasonable demand on the
side of literature, while it more than meets a reasonable expectation
on the side of psychological interest. Distinctly it marks an epoch in
contemporary noveling, and mounts far above the average best toward the
day of better things which I hope it is not rash to image dawning.

II.

I am sure I do not merely fancy the auroral light in a group of stories
by another poet. "The Ruling Passion," Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls his
book, which relates itself by a double tie to Mr. Parker's novel
through kinship of Canadian landscape and character, and through the
prevalence of psychologism over determinism in it. In the situations
and incidents studied with sentiment that saves itself from
sentimentality sometimes with greater and sometimes with less ease, but
saves itself, the appeal is from the soul in the character to the soul
in the reader, and not from brute event to his sensation. I believe
that I like best among these charming things the two sketches--they are
hardly stories--"A Year of Nobility" and "The Keeper of the Dight,"
though if I were asked to say why, I should be puzzled. Perhaps it is
because I find in the two pieces named a greater detachment than I find
in some others of Dr. Van Dyke's delightful volume, and greater
evidence that he has himself so thoroughly and finally mastered his
material that he is no longer in danger of being unduly affected by it.
That is a danger which in his very quality of lyrical poet he is most
liable to, for he is above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as the
chorus usually comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces, in
fact, are so many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he has
f