"The purple flower of a maid"! All the blossomy sweetness, the fragrant lament of Lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas, poor love-lies-bleeding! And yet not poor according to the barren pity we accord the dead, but dowered with another youth set like a crown upon the unstained front of this. Not going with sparse blossoms ripened or decayed, but heaped with buds and dripping over in perfume. She seems so sweet in her still loveliness, the empty province of her balmy spring, that, for a moment fain are you to snatch her back into the pageant of your day. Reading that phrase, you feel the earth is poorer for her loss. And yet, not so, since the world holds other greater worlds as well. Elsewhere she may have grown to age and stature, but here she lives yet in beauteous permanence--as true a part of youth and joy and rapture as the immortal figures on the Grecian urn. While she was but a flying phantom on the frieze of time, Death fixed her there forever--a haunting spirit in perennial bliss. Whenever she touches nature she touches it as a poet. She was of the mid nineties which saw the triumph of the nature school. Behind each of her stories lies a rich background of mountain or woodland or meadow, one that often, as in "A Sea Change," dominates in Thomas Hardy fashion the whole picture. Only a comparatively few of Miss Brown's volumes deal with the field with which her name is chiefly associated. _Meadow Grass_, _Tiverton Tales_, and _The Country Road_ contain the best of her dialect stories. Her heart in later years has been altogether in other work. She has written novels not provincial in their setting, and, unlike Miss Wilkins, she has succeeded in doing really distinctive work. She has the constructive power that is denied so many, especially women, who have succeeded with the short story. She has done dramatic work which has won high rewards and she has written poetry. Perhaps she is a poet first of all. BIBLIOGRAPHY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. _The Mayflower_, 1843; _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, 1852; _Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands_, 1854; _Dred_ (_Nina Gordon_), 1856; _The Minister's Wooing_, 1859; _The Pearl of Orr's Island_, 1862; _Agnes of Sorrento_, 1862; _House and Home Papers_, 1864; _Little Foxes_, 1865; _Religious Poems_, 1867; _Queer Little People_, 1867; _The Chimney Corner_, 1868; _Oldtown Folks_, 1869; _Pink and White Tyranny_, 1871; _Oldtown Fireside Stories_, 1871; _My Wife and I_, 1871; _We and Our Neighbors_, 1875; _Poganuc People_, 1878; _A Dog's Mission_, 1881; _The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe_, Charles Edward Stowe, 1889.