Mrs. Smith has written nothing so well calculated to convey to the majority of readers a clear sense of the richness, originality, and elevation of her genius, as this wonderful little story. It evinces a high degree of creative power, being an organic product of the mind, with a central principle of life, and vital in every part. The scenery, events and characters have all a living connection with the leading idea of the work, and illustrate each other. The form is the ever facile and yielding instrument of the plastic spirit within, and varies with the variations in the story and the changes in the thought or feeling expressed. By a felicity of nature, Mrs. Smith appears instinctively to subordinate the material to the spiritual; and thus by making the former simply the symbol by which she expresses the latter, she spiritualizes matter, and makes it the living body of the soul. She vivifies and vitalizes the form until it becomes o’er informed with spirit. Natural objects as used by the poet, derive all their effect from being the pictorial language of impassioned thought, the visible image being but the embodiment to the eye of the viewless force which penetrates and animates it; and fitly to employ objects as exponents of thoughts, a firm, decisive grasp of spiritual realities, of something lying back of all expression, is necessary. The moment the material predominates over or precedes the spiritual, it becomes so much dead matter, without significance, because without life. A great excellence of the present story is the constant dominion exercised by the soul over or through its forms of expression, and the physiognomical character of the style and imagery. When we thus speak of it as pre-eminently spiritual, we of course imply that it is thoroughly alive.