out of place
here to quote the opinions of two or three of the leading literary
critical journals. WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE, in the _Dial_ says that:

"Looking about among our younger men of letters for the promise of
some new and vital impulse, it has for several years seemed to us
that such an impulse might be expected to come from the work of Mr.
James Lane Allen. He has published few books as yet, but the number
is sufficient to reveal a steadily increasing mastery of his art,
and the quality such as to warrant readers of discernment in
predicting for him a brilliant career and an assured place in the
front rank of American writers. _The Choir Invisible_ does not
disappoint these expectations. It is not only the most ambitious of
Mr. Allen's books, considered merely as to its sale, but it is also
the one in which he has carried to the highest pitch that fineness
of perception and that distinction of manner that have from the
first set his work apart from the work of nearly all of his
contemporaries. Hardly since Hawthorne have we had such pages as
the best of these; hardly since _The Scarlet Letter_ and _The
Marble Faun_ have we had fictive work so spiritual in essence and
adorned with such delicate and lovely embroiderings of the
imagination. There are descriptive passages so exquisitely wrought
that the reader lingers over them to make them a possession
forever; there are inner experiences so intensely realized that
they become a part of the life of his own soul."...

And again writing in the _Boston Transcript_, Bliss Carman, says:

"There are two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the
first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the
fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty,
conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable
conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that
best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style
without strain and yet with an enviable aptness for the sudden
inevitable word.... And yet that care, that deliberation is never
tedious."

Hamilton W. Mabie is attracted more by the landscape beauty of Mr.
Allen's work, and he too makes an original contribution to our subject.
He says in _The Outlook_:

"No American novelist has so imbedded his stories in Nature as has
James