even monstrous developments of character
are in startling contrast with the old-fashioned preciseness of the
language; the conversations, when there are any, being conducted in
that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an "elegant
female." The following is a sample description of one of Brown's
heroines, and is taken from his novel of _Ormond_, the leading
character in which--a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish
wickedness--is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr: "Helena
Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality. Her
features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the
seat of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching. All those
graces of symmetry, smoothness, and luster, which assemble in the
imagination of the painter when he calls from the bosom of her natal
deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfections in the shade,
complexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Helena's intellectual
deficiencies could not be concealed. She was proficient in the
elements of no science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as
disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird.
She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined
the structure of society. . . . She could not commune in their native
dialect with the sages of Rome and Athens. . . . The constitution of
nature, the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of
the external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, and
ultimate destiny of human intelligence were enigmas unsolved and
insoluble by her."

Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis
ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, _Wieland_ (whose
father anticipates "Old Krook," in Dickens's _Bleak House_, by dying of
spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual
voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be
produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story.
Similarly in Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena of
sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his
romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have
now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in
_Edgar Huntley_, and his graphic account in _Arthur Mervyn_ of the
yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Shelley was an admirer
of Brown, and his