Feeling, the lyrical impulse, is the presiding angel who, according to Miss Welty, “carries the crown” for the writer of fiction; place, or setting, however, she calls one of fiction’s most important “lesser angels.” It is clearly a guardian of her own art. In an essay called “Place in Fiction,” she has argued convincingly for its significance. She demonstrates how place provides not only a region or setting for a story, but also a means of fixing it to what is known, recognizable, concrete in the everyday world. Feelings and associations attach themselves to places, which have a more lasting identity than individual human beings. “Place in fiction,” she says, “is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering-spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced. . . .” It serves to focus the vision of the writer, to assist him in convincing the reader that the fictional lie is the world’s reality, to aid him in capturing and disclosing the more subtle and elusive of human thoughts and feelings that need pinning down. Place is like the “steadily visible” surface, the carefully painted scene on the outside of the old china night light, which alight becomes excitingly “the combination of internal and external, glowing at the imagination as one.” Such a use of place for Miss Welty does not result in merely “regional” fiction, for the regional, though everywhere present, is to be transcended: the whole concept of local color would have been alien to Cervantes, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Turgenev, or the writers of the Old Testament, who simply wrote of what they knew. “It seems plain,” she concludes, “that the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly, and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood. It is through place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, fate, or our traveling selves set us down; but where those roots reach toward . . . is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself—that feeds and is fed by the human understanding.”