A drama full of youth and love is enacted by a group of Americans on an Italian stage. A young American of thirty whose struggle for a competence in the Chicago stock-market had worn him down to “the absolute essentials of physical being” goes to Italy to marry the woman he had secretly loved—eight years his senior and now a widow. While pursuing the course of a luke-warm wooing he falls in love with her cousin, a gifted girl made melancholy by a wrongly fostered idea of hereditary insanity. The courage of the woman who relinquishes her claim on him is only surpassed by his energy in dispelling the illusion of insanity that holds the woman he loves.
“‘The eternal spring,’ forms a curious and not altogether satisfactory antithesis to ‘The forerunner,’ insomuch as its plot is a much more conspicuous feature than its human nature. It is not so fine a piece of art as the author’s earlier novel, not so fine even as her short stories.” Frederic Taber Cooper.
+ – Bookm. 23: 190. Ap. ’06. 800w.
“Sentimentality runs riot in this story of young love in Italy.”
– Critic. 48: 474. My. ’06. 70w.
“The story is told with freshness and charm, in parts almost with distinction.” Wm. M. Payne.
+ Dial. 41: 115. S. 1, ’06. 260w.
“Although we have found its leading characters not a little exasperating, ‘The eternal spring’ is a model of unusual originality and interest.”
+ – N. Y. Times. 11: 94. F. 17, ’06. 610w.