s passion for the analysis of motives comes the strong
character, slightly gnarled and knotted by natural circumstances, as
trees that are twisted and misshapen by storms and floods--or characters
gnarled by some interior force working in conjunction with or in
opposition to outward circumstances. She draws no monstrosities, or
monsters, thus avoiding on the one side romance and on the other
burlesque. She keeps to life--the life that fails from "the meanness of
opportunity," or is "dispersed among hindrances" or "wrestles"
unavailingly "with universal pressure."

Why had Mr. Gilfil in those late years of his beneficent life "more of
the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear
hint of it in the open-eyed, loving" young Maynard? Because "it is with
men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches into which they
were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with
some rough boss, some odd excrescence, and what might have been a grand
tree, expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical, misshapen trunk.
Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard
sorrow which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding
into plenteous beauty; and the trivial, erring life, which we visit with
our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best
limb is withered. The dear old Vicar had been sketched out by nature as
a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the finest,
and in the gray-haired man, with his slipshod talk and caustic tongue,
there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature that
had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its life-current in a first
and only love."

Her style is influenced by her purpose--may be said, indeed, to be
created by it. The excellences and the blemishes of the diction come of
the end sought to be attained by it. Its subtleties and obscurities were
equally inevitable. Analytical thinking takes on an analytical
phraseology. It is a striking instance of a mental habit creating a
vocabulary. The method of thought produces the form of rhetoric. Some
of the sentences are mental landscapes. The meaning seems to be in
motion on the page. It is elusive from its very subtlety. It is more
our analyst than her character of Rufus Lyon, who "would fain find
language subtle enough to follow the utmost intricacies of the soul's
pathways." Mrs. Tran