In her later period Miss Wilkins became sophisticated and self-conscious. The acclaim of praise that greeted her short stories tempted her to essay a larger canvas in wider fields of art. She had awakened to a realization of the bareness of her style and she sought to bring to her work ornament and the literary graces. She experimented with verse and drama and juveniles, with long novels and romances, and even with tales of New Jersey life. In vain. Her decline began with _Madelon_, which is improbable and melodramatic, and it continued through all her later work. She wrote problem novels like _The Portion of Labor_, long and sprawling and ineffective, and stories like _By the Light of the Soul_, as impossible and as untrue to life as a young country girl's dream of city society. As a novelist and as a depicter of life outside of her narrow domain, she has small equipment. She stands for but one thing: short stories of the grim and bare New England social system; sketches austere and artless which limn the very soul of a passing old régime; photographs which are more than photographs: which are threnodies. VI The last phase of the school may be studied in the work of Alice Brown, representative of the influences at the end of the century. The late recognition of her fiction--she was born in 1857--which placed her a decade after Miss Wilkins who was born in 1862, compelled her to serve an apprenticeship like that of Howells, and subjected her work to the new shaping influences of the nineties. When she did gain recognition in 1895, she brought a finished art. She had mastered the newly worked-out science of the short story, she had studied the English masters--chiefest of all Stevenson, whose influence so dominated the closing century. She was not a realist as Miss Wilkins was a realist. The New England dialect stories of _Meadow Grass_ were not put forth to indicate the final field that she had chosen for her art: they were experiments just as all the others of her earlier efforts were experiments. Of her first seven books, _Fools of Nature_, with its background of spiritualism, was a serious attempt at serious fiction with a thesis worthy of a George Eliot, _Mercy Warren_ and _Robert Louis Stevenson_ were biographical and critical studies, _By Oak and Thorn_ was a collection of travel essays, _The Road to Castelay_ was a collection of poems, and _The Day of His Youth_ perhaps a romance.