ect, when he turned his
attention from poetry to prose. He had lived too close to nature to be
able ever to keep the green and silver of woods and rivers far from
his thoughts; they were the mirrors in which his fancy saw itself.
Professor Wilson, who had known him as a friend, writing of him in
_Blackwood's_ after his death, says: "Living for years in solitude,
he unconsciously formed friendships with the springs, the brooks,
the caves, the hills, and with all the more fleeting and faithless
pageantry of the sky, that to him came in place of those human
affections from whose indulgence he was debarred by the necessities
that kept him aloof from the cottage fire and up among the mists of
the mountain-top. The still green beauty of the pastoral hills and
vales where he passed his youth inspired him with ever-brooding
visions of fairyland, till, as he lay musing in his lonely shieling,
the world of fantasy seemed, in the clear depths of his imagination, a
lovelier reflection of that of nature, like the hills and heavens more
softly shining in the water of his native lake."

His taste is often defective, as is that of Burns on occasions. This
is a fault which might be expected in a man of his training; but the
vigor and essential worth of the matters which he relates are beyond
all question. He did not always know where to begin his short-story,
or where to terminate. Some of his tales, if edited with blue-pencil
erasures, would be found to contain a nucleus-technique which, though
far from perfect, is more than equal to that of Washington Irving,
who, like Apuleius, "cared not how he loitered by the way," and very
superior to that of most of his immediate successors in the art. His
story here included, of _The Mysterious Bride_,[15] could scarcely be
bettered in its method. To tell it in fewer words would be to obscure
it; to tell it at greater length would be to rob it of its mystery and
to make it obvious. Moreover, by employing atmosphere he tells it
in such a way as to leave the reader with the impression that this
occurrence, for all its magic, might not only be possible, but even
probable--which achievement is the greatest triumph of the short-story
writer's art.

[Footnote 15: Compare with Kipling's treatment of a similar theme in
_The Brushwood Boy_.]

As this history of the evolution of the English short-story commenced
with a poet, Chaucer,[16] who wrote all save two of his short-stories
in poetry, so it fit