"The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so much of the world's life and happiness. 'With the heart man believeth unto righteousness;' a man's love is the measure of his fitness for good or bad company here or elsewhere. Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes!"
The pathos of poor Elsie's story is relieved now and then by humorous descriptions of country manners and customs. The Sprowles' party and the Widow Rowen's "tea-fight" give a vein of light comedy that rests the sympathetic reader as a sudden merry smile upon a grave and troubled face.
The Guardian Angel, the second novel of Doctor Holmes, was not published until 1867, but it is interesting to compare the two stories, for there is a strong family likeness between them. Both show the power of inherited tendencies, though Myrtle Hazard, the heroine of The Guardian Angel, has no alien element in her blood like that which tormented poor Elsie. With Myrtle "it was as when several grafts, bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the same stock. Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her father and mother, but various ancestors came uppermost in their time before the absolute and total result of their several forces had found its equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known as an individual. These inherited impulses were therefore many, conflicting, some of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil held mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her hands; but sweet and gracious influences were also born with her; and the battle of life was to be fought between them, God helping her in her need, and her own free choice siding with one or the other."
The scene opens in a quiet New England village which is roused from its usual lethargy by the startling announcement in the weekly paper of a lost child. This is none other than the little orphan, Myrtle Hazard, who after a few dreary years in the dismal Wither's homestead, escapes by night in her little boat, is rescued by a young student from a frightful death at the rapids, and brought back to her distressed Aunt Silence by good old Byles Gridley—the true "Guardian Angel" of her life.
When old Doctor Hurlbut "ninety-two, very deaf, very feeble, yet a wise counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases," comes to prescribe for the young girl, he says to his son:
"I've seen that look on another face of the same blood—it's a great many years ago, and she was dead before you were born, my boy,—but I've seen that look, and it meant trouble then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now. I see some danger of a brain fever. And if she doesn't have that, then look out for some hysteric fits that will make mischief.... I've been through it all before in that same house. Live folks are only dead folks warmed over. I can see 'em all in that girl's face.—Handsome Judith to begin with. And that queer woman, the Deacon's mother—there's where she gets that hystericky look. Yes, and the black-eyed woman with the Indian blood in her—look out for that—look out for that.
... Four generations—four generations, man and wife—yes, five generations before this Hazard child I've looked on with these old eyes. And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every one of 'em in this child's face—it's the forehead of this one, and it's the eyes of that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look that I remember in another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that same voice before—yes, yes—as long ago as when I was first married."
Aside from the interest of the story there is a strange fascination in tracing the development of these various ancestral traits.
"This body in which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans is not a private carriage, but an omnibus," says old Byles Gridley in his Thoughts on the Universe—dead book that was destined to so grand a resurrection! Surely no one can deny the successive development of inherited bodily aspects and habitudes, and the same thing happens, the author avers, "in the mental and moral nature, though the latter may be less obvious to common observation."
The Guardian Angel while a deep study of the Reflex Function in its higher sphere, is not without its lighter, more mirthful side. Says The London News, "the story is exceedingly humorous and comic in the less serious chapters. There is no such minor poet in the whole range of fiction as the immortal Gifted Hopkins. In the character of Hopkins all the foibles and vanities of the literary nature are exemplified in the most mirthful manner. If Doctor Holmes has more characters like Gifted Hopkins in his mind, the hilarity of two continents is not in much danger of being extinguished."