Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/5



author:Charles Brockden Brown was one of the earliest American novelists, and is inferior to none of his countrymen who have succeeded him in the paths of romance, either in originality, power, or the faculty of conferring, during the perusal of his fictions, a deep and sustained interest. Indeed, it might truly be said, that in originality he has not been surpassed by any inventor of story of whatever age or country; for, though his style in composition is modelled on the intense and terribil via of Godwin, he has sought, in the hitherto unexplored phenomena of our nature, for the subject matter of his fables; and, by the agencies of these, he has produced effects equally new and stupendous, without violating the eternal laws of truth. To read, for the first time, one of Brown's best romances, is a memorable circumstance in our intellectual life. Were his themes supernatural or magical, we might forget them after perusal, or at any 'rate, the impression would not haunt our minds with unfailing tenacity; but as the scenes he loves to depict (strange though they are), arise out of those mysteries of our nature, the effects of which we have all witnessed, or may witness, and to which we are all more or less subject, we cannot "bid his shadows depart" after he has once raised them.

A writer, in a forgotten journal, comparing Brown with Godwin, thus characterises the former:-