The latter is "made happy" in the end with Sally Kittredge. Mrs.
Stowe does not seem conscious of the intense and bitter irony of the
last scenes. She conveys the misanthropy of Swift without feeling or
knowing it.
In style, "The Pearl of Orr's Island" ranks with the best narratives in
American literature. Though different from the style of Irving and
Hawthorne, it shows an equal mastery of English in expressing, not only
facts, events, and thoughts, but their very spirit and atmosphere. It
is the exact mirror of the author's mind and character. It is fresh,
simple, fluent, vigorous, flexible, never dazzling away attention
from what it represents by the intrusion of verbal felicities which
are pleasing apart from the vivid conceptions they attempt to convey.
The uncritical reader is unconscious of its excellence because it is so
excellent,--that is, because it is so entirely subordinate to the
matter which it is the instrument of expressing. At times, however, the
singular interest of the things described must impress the dullest
reader with the fact that the author possesses uncommon powers of
description. The burial of James Lincoln, the adventure of little Mara
and Moses on the open sea, the night-visit which Mara makes to the
rendezvous of the outlaws, and the incidents which immediately precede
Mara's death, are pictured with such vividness, earnestness, and
fidelity, that nobody can fail to feel the strange magic communicated
to common words when they are the "nimble servitors" of genius and
passion.
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