These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting,
which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in
rapid sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by
patient analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most
successful in female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an
unmistakable virility and grasp and scientific firmness. This
indispensable intellectual process, which will be relished by
admirers of George Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a
charming landscape background, for the most part English. Mrs. Ward
has been a true disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really
undergone its influence. Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere
background; its spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons,
as understood by the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at
work, in the formation, in the refining, of character. It has been a
stormy day:--
"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from
the white mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight lay across its
upper end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley
hung in air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream
wavering [64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling
rain-clouds.
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