" Another discovered that
it must have been written in Maine, by the perfection with which
peculiar features of scenery there are described.
A young girl could not sufficiently express her delight at the simple
nature with which scenes of childhood are given, and especially at
Margaret's first going to meeting. She had never elsewhere found
written down what she had felt.
A mature reader, one of the most spiritualized and harmonious minds we
have ever met, admires the depth and fulness in which the workings of
the spirit through the maiden's life are seen by the author, and shown
to us; but laments the great apparatus with which the consummation of
the whole is brought about, and the formation of a new church and
state, before the time is yet ripe, under the banner of Mons. Christi.
But all these voices, among those most worthy to be heard, find in the
book a _real presence_, and draw from it auspicious omens that an
American literature is possible even in our day, because there are
already in the mind here existent developments worthy to see the
light, gold-fishes amid the moss in the still waters.
For ourselves, we have been most charmed with the way the Real and
Ideal are made to weave and shoot rays through one another, in which
Margaret bestows on external nature what she receives through books,
and wins back like gifts in turn, till the pond and the mythology are
alternate sections of the same chapter.
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