heath, whistled over by October blasts meagerly adorned with the dry stalks
of scented shrubs and the bald heads of the sapless mullein."

Brown's place in the history of fiction is due to the fact that he
introduced the Gothic romance to American literature. He loved to subject
the weird, the morbid, the terrible, to a psychological analysis. In this
respect he suggests Hawthorne, although there are more points of difference
than of likeness between him and the great New England romancer. In weird
subject matter, but not in artistic ability, he reminds us of Poe. Brown
could devise striking incidents, but he lacked the power to weave them
together in a well-constructed plot. He sometimes forgot that important
incidents needed further elaboration or reference, and he occasionally left
them suspended in mid-air. His lack of humor was too often responsible for
his imposing too much analysis and explanation on his readers. Although he
did not hesitate to use the marvelous in his plots, his realistic mind
frequently impelled him to try to explain the wonderful occurrences. He
thus attempted to bring in ventriloquism to account for the mysterious
voices which drove Wieland to kill his wife and children.

It is, however, not difficult for a modern reader to become so much
interested in the first volume of _Arthur Mervyn_ as to be unwilling to
leave it unfinished. Brown will probably be longest remembered for his
strong pictures of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, his use of
the Indian in romance, and his introduction of the outdoor world of the
wilderness and the forest.

POETRY--THE HARTFORD WITS

The Americans were slow to learn that political independence could be far
more quickly gained than literary independence. A group of poets, sometimes