Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/6

vi "He was a close and successful copyist of the English sage's style; and they appear to have had community of thought in their views, moral, religious, and political. Here, however, the resemblance ceases, and Brown becomes a gigantic original. His stories are a succession of most romantic incidents. They consist, in a great degree, of ordinary events, clothed by circumstances with a ghostly horror, and of startling, uncommon situations, amid the wide-spread solitudes, the lone savannas, the unthreaded thickets of America—upon peaks inaccessible—in the 'hollow mines of earth.' It would seem that he was a much younger man than Godwin when he wrote: his imagination runs riot with him. He probably passed his early youth in the house of a settler, where the sight of a strange face furnished talk for a week, begetting at length, in the succeeding loneliness, doubts as to whether it was really of the earth or not. In such a situation he has sat by the fire-side and heard the plash of naked feet over-head in a deserted room; and fancied lights coming towards him on the staircases of unoccupied and locked-up houses; and seen faces not his own in the looking-glass; and caught a glimpse of eyes glaring over an enclosure upon one burying the dead at night; and encountered a man walking in his sleep about a solitary tree, miles from any human habitation. The loss of a key, even, becomes a terrific occurrence."

These are, for the most part, just remarks, and they are expressed with striking eloquence; but the writer, we think, has failed to perceive the peculiar characteristics of Brown's works. His events are not "ordinary," though they are reconcilable to nature. He