The old conflict between the reformer’s passion and the art-instinct is renewed in the novels and stories of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; who possesses the artist’s responsiveness in a high degree, with but little of the artist’s restraint. Exquisitely sensitive to the significant beauty of the world, she is no less sensitive to the appeal of human pain. In “Hedged In” and “The Silent Partner,” in her stories of the squalid tenement and the storm-beaten coast, her literary work reflects, point for point, her personal work for the fallen, the toiling and the tempted. Her passionate sympathy gives her a power of thrilling, of commanding the tribute of tears, which is all her own. An enthusiast for womanhood, she has given us in “The Story of Avis,” and “Dr. Zay” striking studies of complementary themes; “Avis,” despite certain flaws of style to which objection is trite, remaining the greater, as it is the sadder, book. All Miss Phelps’s stories strike root into New England, though it is not precisely Mrs. Cooke’s New England of iron farmers and stony farms; and none strikes deeper root than “Avis,” a natural product of the intellectual region whence “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” sprang thirty years before. No other woman, among writers who have arisen since the war, has received in such fullness the spiritual inheritance of New England’s past. The changes brought about by the influx of foreigners into the factory towns of the East, are reflected in the pages of Miss Phelps, particularly in “The Silent Partner.” A recent worker of the same vein is Lillie Chace Wyman, whose short stories, collected under the symbolic title “Poverty Grass,” are marked by sincerity and simple power. Sarah Orne Jewett roams the old pastures, gathering many pungent handfuls of the familiar flowers and herbs that retain for us their homely preciousness. She is attracted also by the life of the coast. Without vigorous movement, her sketches and stories have always an individual, delicate picturesqueness, the quality of a small, clear water-color. “A Country Doctor” is to be noted for its very quiet and true presentation of a symmetrical womanhood, naturally drawn toward the large helpfulness of professional life.