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“ Nature furnishes the background of many charming American stories, and finds delicate or effective remembrance in the hands of writers like Miss Jewett and Miss Murfree; but in Mr. Allen's romances Nature is not behind the action; she is involved in it. Her presence is everywhere; her influence streams through the story; the deep and prodigal beauty which she wears in rural Kentucky shines on every page; the tremendous forces which sweep through her disclose their potency in human passion and impulse. ”

“ The lawlessness of Nature is the lawlessness of man, untempered and ungoverned by that principle of chastity which is the law of love; and again Nature, lawless in herself, becomes beneficent, law-abiding, when controlled by that higher law of instinct in man which is the seal and sign of the Divine upon his soul. Without moralizing, a moral principle is at work in Summer in Arcady; it is its vital distinction that over the whole action reigns a moral simplicity which, like sunlight, licks up the fœtid, the exciting, sickening, uncertain torch-flames of passion. ”

“ It has a richness of texture which American fiction, as a rule, has lacked; there are depths in it which American fiction has not, as rule, brought to the consciousness of readers; depths of life below the region of observation. There is in it the unconsciousness and abandon which are the very substance of art, and which are so constantly missed in the fiction of extreme sophistication. ”

“ The Choir Invisible is like an inward realization of the 'Domain of Arnheim!' More than in his other books there rests upon this work that unembarrassed calm, where truth sits Jove-like 'on the quiet seat above the thunder,' where the spirit is dignified, is priest-like, and inspired; where beauty dwells in a harmony of thought and expression that subdues and haunts us. ”

“ Allen's sharpest critic must confess that in no other American book is atmosphere so pervasive, so potential, so charged with passion and beauty.
In The Choir Invisible a still deeper note is struck; the moral insight, always clear, is more penetrating; the feeling for life is at once more restrained and more passionate; the constructive skill is more marked ”

“ There are descriptive passages so exquisitely wrought that the reader lingers over them to make them a possession forever; there are inner experiences so intensely realized that they become a part of the life of his own soul."...
And again writing in the Boston Transcript, Bliss Carman, says:
"There are two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... ”

“ And in order to point the way to a full justification of the author's sincerity and moral purpose against the charge of pandering to a decadent taste for the 'downwardtending' fiction of the hour, it will be sufficient to show that the plea for the Divine supremacy of goodness, and for an unfallen purity in man and woman, has never been more strongly urged in modern fiction than in The Choir Invisible. ”

“ As was so often the case during the political reconstruction of the South, the heroine passed from the sphere of the high social organization which existed at her birth to the humblest and most obscure hard manual work, while the hero rose from the lowest social condition to the highest intellectual plane, finding his development along the lines of religious and scientific thought. ”

“ The two chief characters of the story are a young man and a young woman. The young man sprung from the lowest stratum of Southern society, and the young woman from the highest. The story of the intermingling of their lives must be left for the reader to discover. ”

“ Contemporary judgment is singularly unanimous in placing Mr. Allen in the front rank of American novelists, and it may not be out of place here to quote the opinions of two or three of the leading literary critical journals. William Morton Payne, in the Dial says that:
"Looking about among our younger men of letters for the promise of some new and vital impulse, it has for several years seemed to us that such an impulse might be expected to come from the work of Mr. ”