It is no accident, therefore, that she represents Simeon, this piece of corrugated inflexibility, as equally far from Dr. Hopkins, the large-hearted Puritan who was bigger than his creed, and from young James Marvin, who wanted to be better than he was but had no creed at all. In the chapter "Which Treats of Romance" Mrs. Stowe perhaps did not let the moral wholly take care of itself, since she came into court as a special pleader for beauty as an ally of religion and brought an indictment against the niggardliness of a life founded on a dogmatic dread of eternal fire. The moral of the book, if one must be given in a sentence, is that love realized is even finer than love renounced. Like "Uncle Tom" and "Dred," "The Minister's Wooing" has its element of instruction as well as of edification, for it is a studied and faithful picture of Rhode Island life just after the Revolution--a period about as remote from Mrs. Stowe as the slave-story epoch is from the modern reader. And because it is less of an allegory the characters are more lifelike, not having to carry each his Christian's pack of argument on his shoulders. As Lowell stated,[25] they were set in contrast not by the simple and obvious method in fiction of putting them in different social ranks--aristocrat and commoner, master and man, Roundhead and Cavalier, pioneer, Indian and townsman. Between Mrs. Stowe's village folk caste distinctions were of little moment; a careful realism was taxed to show the vital and homely differences between one individual and another. Her success in this respect is what gives any distinction to "The Pearl of Orr's Island" (1862). The Pearl herself, who is a bit of labeled symbolism (chap. xxviii),--a Little Eva transported to the Maine coast and thence to heaven,--is almost the only insignificant character. Moses Pennell, an exotic, is comparatively lifelike, and the actual village people are as real as can be. [25] _New York Tribune_, June 13, 1859.