Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[71] historian Jared Sparks undertook the publication of a Library of American biography, he included in the very first volumewith a literary instinct most creditable to one so absorbed in the severer tasks of history -a memoir of Charles Brockden Brown by W. H. Prescott. It was an appropriate tribute to the first writer of imaginative prose in America, and also the first to exert a positive influence upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands towards an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of this influence, all manner of wheels began to move, in fiction; concealed doors opened in lonely houses; fatal epidemics laid cities desolate; secret plots were organized; unknown persons from foreign lands died in garrets leaving large sums of money; the honor of innocent women was constantly endangered, though usually saved in time; people were subject to somnambulism and general frenzy; vast conspiracies were organized with petty aims and smaller results. Brown's books, published between 1798 and 1801, made their way across the ocean with a promptness that now seems inexplicable; they represented American literature to England. Mrs. Shel.