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“With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the light.”

Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s real material, the human soul. The Deliverance is a story of revenge with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer, while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher; wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair, directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken and sipping her port, blind—blind—successfully deceived, successfully kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years since the slave Phyllis “‘got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’”