exclude whatever humanity of character preceded and belied it from
all active exercise, all social confidence; how the knowledge of the
bar between the minds of others and his own deprived the criminal of
all motive to ambition, and blighted knowledge of all fruit.
Miserable in his affections, barren in his intellect; clinging to
solitude, yet accursed in it; dreading as a danger the fame he had
once coveted; obscure in spite of learning, hopeless in spite of
love, fruitless and joyless in his life, calamitous and shameful in
his end,--surely such is no palliative of crime, no dalliance and
toying with the grimness of evil! And surely to any ordinary
comprehension and candid mind such is the moral conveyed by the
fiction of 'Eugene Aram.'"--[A word to the Public, 1847]

In point of composition "Eugene Aram" is, I think, entitled to rank
amongst the best of my fictions. It somewhat humiliates me to acknowledge
that neither practice nor study has enabled me to surpass a work written
at a very early age, in the skilful construction and patient development
of plot; and though I have since sought to call forth higher and more
subtle passions, I doubt if I have ever excited the two elementary
passions of tragedy,--namely, pity and terror,--to the same degree. In
mere style, too, "Eugene Aram," in spite of certain verbal oversights,
and defects in youthful taste (some of which I have endeavored to remove
from the present edition), appears to me unexcelled by any of my later
writings,--at least in what I have always studied as the main essential
of style in narrative; namely, its harmony with the subject selected and
the passions to be moved,--while it exceeds them all in the minuteness
and fidelity of its descriptions of external nature. This indeed it ought
to do, since the study of external nature is made a peculiar attribute of
the prin cipal character, whose fate colors the narrative. I do not know
whether it has been observed that the time occupied by the events of the