“The descriptions of battle scenes in the war and the lurid picture of the draft riots in New York are worth reading. Nothing that Mr. Roe has ever written is so vivid and dramatic as his sketch of the three terrible days in New York when the mob ruled the city, sacked the colored orphan asylum, and spread dismay in a thousand homes.
“The following story has been taking form in my mind for several years, and at last I have been able to write it out… At this distance from the late Civil War, it is time that passion and prejudice sank below the horizon.
“That man is an opium-eater,” he said in a low tone, and his explanation of the effects of the drug was a diagnosis of Mr. Jocelyn’s symptoms and appearance. The firm’s sympathy for a man seemingly in poor health was transformed into disgust and antipathy, since there is less popular toleration of this weakness than of drinking habits.
The Charleston Earthquake of August 31, 1886 (8.6 on the Richter scale) was strong enough to be felt in Boston, Chicago, New Orleans and Milwaukee. It caused speculation that Florida had broken off the continent.
"It is a love story, pure and simple, of the type that belongs to no age or clime or school, because it is the story of the love that has been common to humanity, wherever it has been lifted above the level of the brutes.
"A Face Illumined is one of E.P. Roe's best novels in my opinion. I loved his thoughts on inner beauty. –eleniel
"The author does not, as is often the case, make the moral design an excuse for literary shortcomings.
“It is a book which those who begin will be pretty sure to finish, deriving from it a new impulse to the truest knighthood.” — Harper’s Magazine.
“The whole tone of the work is manly and healthful.
"He vindicates his right to use the talent which God has given him for the instruction and interest of the thousands who read his works." — New York Evangelist.
"The hero is simple, strong, and manly; much such a man as Mr.
“The character of the selfish, morbid, cynical hero, and his gradual transformation under the influence of the sweet and high-spirited heroine, are portrayed with a masculine firmness, which is near akin to power, and some of the conversations are animated and admirable.
“The narrative is fascinating.” — Chicago Advance.
“An exceedingly well-written story.” — Churchman.
Book Contents Reviews Preface 1 Three Girls 2 A Future Of Human Designing 3 Three Men 4 The Skies Darkening 5 The Storm Threatening 6 The Wreck 7 Among The Breakers 8 Warped 9 A Desert Island 10 Edith Becomes A “Divinity” 11 Mrs.
“Barriers Burned Away, a story of the Great Chicago Fire, was first published serially in a magazine, the New York Evangelist. In 1872, when it came out in book form, it shortly became the most popular book of the year.
This book was inspired by a newspaper account telling of a widowed farmer who visited the county poor house, looking for a good housekeeper. He is supposed to have said, “If there is a worthy woman here, I will marry her.
“They who declared that reason would not allow them to believe that God could once become Incarnate, saw no reason to doubt the manifold Reincarnation of Man. They who complained that they found the straight and level highway of Christianity too difficult a road for them to follow, or that there was no sure foothold therein, were content to lose themselves among the mazes of Superstition, or to flounder and stumble among the stony wastes of Unbelief.