ribed the fact, that, in the very few
instances where crimes of this nature have occurred in England or
America, the memory of them is preserved with singular pertinacity,
the smallest details handed down from generation to generation, and
the very spots in which they have occurred, howmuchsoever altered or
improved in the course of ages, haunted, as if by an actual presence,
by the horror and the scent of blood; while on the other hand the fame
of ordinary deeds of violence and rapine seems almost to be lost
before the lives of the perpetrators are run out.

One, and almost, I believe, a singular instance of this kind--for I
would not dignify the brawls and assassinations which have disgraced
some of our southern cities, the offspring of low principles and an
unregulated society, by comparing them to the class of crimes in
question, which imply even in their atrocity a something of perverted
honor, of extravagant affection, or at least of not ignoble
passion--is the well-known Beauchamp tragedy of Kentucky, a tale of
sin and horror which has afforded a theme to the pens of several
distinguished writers, and the details of which are as well known on
the spot at present, as if years had not elapsed since its occurrence.
And this, too, in a country prone above all others, from the migratory
habits of its population, to cast aside all tradition, and to lose
within a very few years the memory of the greatest and most
illustrious events upon the very stage of their occurrence.

It is not, therefore, wonderful that in England, where the immobility
of the population, the reverence for antiquity, and the great
prevalence of oral tradition, induced probably at first by the want of
letters, cause the memory of even past trifles to dwell for ages in
the breasts of the simple and moral people, any deed of romantic
character, any act of unusual atrocity, any crime prompted by unusual
or extraordinary motives, should become, as it were, part and parcel
of the place wherein it was wrought; that the leaves of the trees
should whisper it to the winds of evening; that the echoes of the
lonely hills should repeat it; that the waters should sigh a burthen
to its strain; and that the very night should assume a deeper shadow,
a more horrid gloom, from the awe of the unforgotten sin.

I knew a place in my boyhood, thus haunted by the memory of strange
crime; and whether it was merely the terrible romance of the story, or
the wild and gloom