I am sure I do not merely fancy the auroral light in a group of stories by another poet.  “The Ruling Passion,” Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls his book, which relates itself by a double tie to Mr. Parker’s novel through kinship of Canadian landscape and character, and through the prevalence of psychologism over determinism in it.  In the situations and incidents studied with sentiment that saves itself from sentimentality sometimes with greater and sometimes with less ease, but saves itself, the appeal is from the soul in the character to the soul in the reader, and not from brute event to his sensation.  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.  Canada seems the home of primitive character; the seventeenth century survives there among the habitants, with their steadfast faith, their picturesque superstitions, their old world traditions and their new world customs.  It is the land not only of the habitant, but of his oversoul, the good cure, and his overlord the seigneur, now faded economically, but still lingering socially in the scene of his large possessions.  Their personality imparts a charm to the many books about them which at present there seems to be no end to the making of; and such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke’s gives us a likeness of them, which if it is idealized is idealized by reservation, not by attribution.