And One Book Too
Remains - The Series Of Sketches About The Poor Little Hamlet,
In Which She Lived So Long And Laboured So Hard To Support
Herself And Her Parents, The Turtledove Mated With A
Cormorant.
Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject,
in a happy moment she took up this humble one lying at her own
door and allowed her self to write naturally even as in her
most intimate letters.
This is the reason of the vitality of
Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and reflected the author
herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive nature, her
bright playful humorous spirit. There is no thought, no mind
stuff in it, and it is a classic! It is about the country,
and she has so little observation that it might have been
written in a town, out of a book, away from nature's sights
and sounds. Her rustic characters are not comparable to those
of a score or perhaps two or three score of other writers who
treat of such subjects. The dialogue, when she makes them
talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she
puts in a little romance of her own making one regrets it.
And so one might go on picking it all to pieces like a
dandelion blossom. Nevertheless it endures, outliving scores
of in a way better books on the same themes, because her own
delightful personality manifests itself and shines in all
these little pictures. This short passage describing how she
took Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather
cowslips in the meadows, will serve as an illustration.
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