[Brooks was an American poet. In the following excerpt, he praises Murfree's writing for its realistic rendering of a previously "unknown human sphere, " but finds the use of dialect nearly "unreadable. "]

In [Mary Murfree's] many stories, long and short, the same characters reappeared that one met in her first book, In the Tennessee Mountains, but this and The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains revealed an unknown human sphere in a way that was singularly real, impressive and poetic. One of the recurring themes was that of the cultivated stranger who meets the unsophisticated mountain girl, and many of the stories dealt with the conflicts of the mountain folk and the world outside which the revenueofficer and the sheriff represented. Among the other local types were the blacksmith and the horse-thief, who mysteriously disappears, like the revenue-spy; for one of the unwritten laws of the moonshiners was that the informer should perish, and outsiders in general were the enemy in the moonshiners' minds. For the rest, they knew nothing of social classes and their speech was full of poetry, and especially the biblical metaphors of Old Testament people for whom dancing was more sinful than killing a man in a quarrel and who bore such names as Abednego and Jubal. The preacher was omnipresent and one of the best of Miss Murfree's characters was the infidel prophet Kelsey with his second sight who thought he was the only unbeliever in a Christian world and whom Satan hunted through the mountains like a partridge. A few of the other mountaineers were admirably drawn, the fugitive Rick Tyler who was falsely accused and who looked like a hound in the middle of the hunting season, and Groundhog Cayce and his giant sons, the moonshiners with their forest arts, who recalled the Tennessee brood of Cooper's Ishmael Bush. Some of the scenes were idyllic and many abounded in fine descriptions of the forest, the flowers and the mountains that towered over all. The stories were vibrant as often as not with the violent feelings of the mountain folk, whether anger, love, loyalty, resentment or the thirst for revenge.

Now and then Miss Murfree's stories were marked by great dramatic power, "The 'Harnt' that Walks Chilhowee," for example, the tale of the fugitive cripple who was taken for a ghost, and some of her historical writing was interesting also. . . .

But, interesting as much of it was, the best of this writing was scarcely readable, two generations later, for the very same reason that many other gifted writers were unreadable also, because of their abuse of dialect. . . .

There were many reasons for this study of dialect,—the spread of the philological mind and especially the wish to commemorate the local life and preserve the local speech that seemed destined to be lost with the growth of the industrial system and the national feeling. . . .

It was the pains that writers took to reproduce dialect exactly that blighted many books which might otherwise have survived if the writers had used a little more tact, less science and more art, and suggested the dialect merely by occasional touches. The attempt to convey it literally defeated its own end because what was intended for the ear was presented to the eye. Unable to see the sound, one resented the obstruction.