The book depicts German country life and manners, with vivid descriptions of the Rhineland and of English scenery, as well as a realistic word-picture of the Oberammergau Passion Play.

The heroine makes her appearance as a young and delicate market-girl, presiding over a table of dainty laces or needle work, the results of her own toil.

She has a male friend in the schoolmaster also, who later on would be nearer if he could, and who meanwhile with his books and talk feeds her growing culture with music and knowledge of art and of the great world outside the valley.

An early and happy love fades into a consuming grief; but an American gentleman and his wife become interested in her sweet face and pure character, and her elevation begins.

[1] The story of her blossoming out in beauty both of person and character as these changes successively come to her, is told very deftly and vividly, and in a style remarkable for its purity and its artistic use of the imagination.

None of these uplifting stages seem to be at all foreign to her, and after seeing her graceful motions and hearing her sing at her spinning wheel on her mother's porch, we feel that she has a soul within her, however she came by it, that is capable of everything which is attributed to her afterwards.

The writer, who is the wife of a professor in a theological seminary, has evidently watched the scenes she describes, whether of home life in Germany, or mountain views in Saxony, or the Passion Play at Oberammergau, or works of art in the galleries.

[1] The New York Times published a scathing review:—[5]We may commend this book to all readers who are incapable of digesting any but the very weakest description of mental food.

Some readers may perhaps be disposed to question whether such a narrative of the fortunes of a young peasant girl may not have a bad rather than a good tendency, and we should not be indisposed to take part with such.

In fact, it is one of that vast multitude of books which seem to have to reason for being, which make us think with wonder at the quantities of spare cash which some writers must possess if they pay their publishers, and which find readers, if they have them at all, in quarters that are far beyond the ken of people of average understanding.