It is something that has tinged the nature of our whole life, whatever its varied sources, and when its color seems gone out of us, or, going, it renews itself in all the mystical lights and shadows so familiar to us that, till we read some such tales as those grouped together here, we are scarcely aware how largely they form the complexion of our thinking and feeling. i-v vi-vii viii 1 2-301 302-304: blank note: last leaf is a blank, title page printed in orange and black, original decorated olive green cloth, front and spine panels stamped in gold and silver, fore and bottom. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1907. SHAPES THAT HAUNT THE DUSK: HARPER'S NOVELETTES. It is as noticeable among our Southerners of French race as among our New-Englanders deriving from Puritan zealots accustomed to wonder-working providences, or among those descendants of the German immigrants who brought with them to our Middle States the superstitions of the Rhine valleys or the Hartz Mountains. Howells, William Dean and Henry Mills Alden (editors). Their love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry, but is apparently an effect from psychological influences in the past, widely separated in time and place. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live more in the spirit than any other. The writers of American short stories, the best short stories in the world, surpass in nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between experience and illusion.
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