I believe
that I like best among these charming things the two
sketches--they are hardly stories--"A Year of Nobility" and "The
Keeper of the Dight," though if I were asked to say why, I should
be puzzled. Perhaps it is because I find in the two pieces named
a greater detachment than I find in some others of Dr. Van Dyke's
delightful volume, and greater evidence that he has himself so
thoroughly and finally mastered his material that he is no longer
in danger of being unduly affected by it. That is a danger which
in his very quality of lyrical poet he is most liable to, for he
is above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as the chorus usually
comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces, in fact, are
so many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he has felt
rather than reasoned his way to. It is implicational rather than
intentional. It is none the worse but all the better on that
account, and I cannot say that the psychologism is the worse for
being frankly, however uninsistently, moralized. A humor,
delicate and genuine as the poetry of the stories, plays through
them, and the milde macht of sympathy with everything human
transfers to the pleasant pages the foresters and fishermen from
their native woods and waters.
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