Her power lies in her purity of style, her humorous little touches, and her power of characterization. Work like her "A White Heron," "Miss Tempy's Watchers," and "The Dulham Ladies," has a certain lightness of touch, a pathos and a humor, a skill in delineation which wastes not a word or an effect, that places it among the most delicate and finished of American short stories. Yet brilliant as they are in technique, in characterization and background and atmosphere, they lack nevertheless the final touch of art. They are _too_ literary; they are too much works of art, too much from the intellect and not enough from the heart. They are Sir Roger de Coverley sketches, marvelously well done, but always from the Sir Roger standpoint. There is a certain "quality" in all that Miss Jewett wrote, a certain unconscious _noblesse oblige_ that kept her ever in the realm of the gentle, the genteel, the Berwick old régime. One feels it in her avoidance of everything common and squalid, in her freedom from passion and dramatic climax, in her objective attitude toward her characters. She is always sympathetic, she is moved at times to real pathos, but she stands apart from her picture; she observes and describes; she never, like Rose Terry Cooke, mingles and shares. She cannot. Hers is the pride that the lady of the estate takes in her beloved peasantry; of the patrician who steps down of an afternoon into the cottage and comes back to tell with amusement and perhaps with tears of what she finds there. All her life she lived apart from that which she described. Her winters she spent in Boston, much of the time in the home of Mrs. James T. Fields, surrounded by memorials of the great period of American literature. Like Howells, she wrote ever in the presence of the Brahmins--a task not difficult, for she herself was a Brahmin. It was impossible for her to be common or to be narrowly realistic. She wrote with deliberation and she revised and rerevised and finished her work, conscious ever of her art--a classicist, sending forth nothing that came as a cry from her heart, nothing that came winged with a message, nothing that voiced a vision and a new seeing, nothing that was not literary in the highest classical sense. In the history of the new period she stands midway between Mrs. Spofford and Mrs. Freeman; a new realist whose heart was with the old school; a romanticist, but equipped with a camera and a fountain pen. V