It was peculiarly a New England book: only a New Englander of the old tradition can understand the full meaning of it, and yet it came at a moment when the whole nation was eager and ready for its message. The war had brought to tens of thousands what it had brought to this New England woman. In every house there was mourning, and the Puritan vision of the after life, unreasonable and lifeless, was inadequate for a nation that had been nourished upon sentimentalism. The heart of the people demanded something warm and sensible and convincing in place of the cold scriptural metaphors and abstractions. The new spirit that had been awakened by the war called for reality and concrete statement everywhere, and it found in the book, which made of heaven another earth--a glorified New England perhaps--with occupation and joys and friendships unchanged, a revelation with which it was in full accord. It brought comfort, for in every line of it was the intensity of conviction, of actual experience. It quivered with sympathy, it breathed reality from every page, and it seemed to break down the barriers until the two worlds were so near together that one might hold his breath to listen. The book, while it undoubtedly helped to prolong the sentimental era in America, nevertheless must be counted among the forces that brought to the new national period its fuller measure of toleration, its demand for reality, its wider sympathy. All the author's later books bear the same marks of intensity, of subjectivity, of purpose: all of them are outpourings of herself. She is a special pleader shrilling against abuses, as in _Loveliness_, which excoriates vivisection, arguing for causes as in _The Story of Avis_ and _Doctor Zay_, which take high ground concerning women, or preaching sermons as in _A Singular Life_, a vision of the ideal pastor and his church. The accumulated Puritanism within her gave to all her work dramatic tension. It is impossible to read her with calmness: one is shocked and grieved and harrowed; one is urged on every page to think, to feel, to rush forth and right some wrong, to condemn some evil or champion some cause.