The contents of the magazine corresponded with the contents of the Port Folio; there were the same abuse of Wordsworth, criticisms of Milton and Shakespeare, and articles upon "literary resemblances." In November, 1803, Brown began to publish in the magazine his "Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist." The following poem, written during the prevalence of the yellow fever, in 1797, appeared in the Literary Magazine for September, 1806.
PHILADELPHIA—AN ELEGY.
Written during the prevalence of the Yellow Fever in 1797.
Imperial daughter of the West,
Why thus in widow'd weeds recline?
With every gift of nature blest,
The empire of a world was thine.
Late brighter than the star that beams
When the soft morning carol flows:
Now mournful as the maniac's dreams,
When melancholy veils his woes.
What foe, with more than Gallic ire,
Has thinned thy city's thronging way,
Bade the sweet breath of youth expire,
And manhood's powerful pulse decay?
No Gallic foe's ferocious band,
Fearful as fate, as death severe,
But the destroying angel's hand,
With hotter rage, with fiercer fear.
I saw thee in thy prime of days,
In glory rich, in beauty fair,
When many a patriot shar'd thy praise,
And nurs'd thee with maternal care.
Columbia's genius, veil thy brow,
Guardian of freedom, hither bend:
The prayer of mercy meets thee now,
With healing energy descend.
Chase far the fiend whose burning tread
Consumes the fairest flower that blows;
Bends the sweet lily's bashful head,
And fades the blushes of the rose.
E'en now ill-omened birds of prey
Through the unpeopled mansions rove:
Quench'd is that eye's inspiring ray,
And lost the breezy lip of love.
Yet guard the Friend, who wandering near
Haunts which the loitering Schuylkill laves,
Bestows the tributary tear,
Or fans with sighs the drowsy waves.
And while his mercy-dealing hand
Feeds many a famished child of care,
Wave round his brow thy saving wand,
And breathe thy sweetness through the air;
'Till borne on Health's elastic wing,
Aloft the rapid whirlwind flies;
The coldest gale of Zembla bring,
And brace with frost the dripping skies.
Yet bring the naiads, bring their urns,
Haste, and the marble fount unclose,
Through streets where Syrian summer burns,
'Till all the cool libation flows
Cool as the brook that bathes the heath
When noon unfolds his silent hours,
Refreshing as the morning's breath
Adown the cleansing streamlet pours.
Imperial daughter of the West,
No rival wins thy wreath away;
In all the wealth of nature drest,
Again thy sovereign charms display;
See all thy setting glories rise,
Again thy thronging streets appear;
Thy mart a hundred ports supplies,
Thy harvests feed thy circling year.
The magazine lived five years and made eight volumes octavo.
In 1806 Brown began to edit and John Conrad to publish the American Register. It contained abstracts of laws and public proceedings, reviews of literature and of foreign and domestic scientific intelligence, American and foreign State papers, etc. After five volumes had been published, Charles Brockden Brown died in his house at Eleventh and George Streets, on the 19th of February, 1810. It was in this house, which was not upon the east side of Eleventh Street, as Neal asserted in Blackwood's Magazine, nor was it "a low, squalid, two-story house," that Thomas Sully saw him, and said: "I saw him a little before his death. I had never known him—never heard of him—never read any of his works. He was in a deep decline. It was in the month of November—our Indian summer, when the air is full of smoke. Passing a window one day, I was caught by the sight of a man with a remarkable physiognomy, writing at a table in a dark room. The sun shone directly upon his head. I never shall forget it. The dead leaves were falling then—it was Charles Brockden Brown."
Of the obscure ground in which the body of this literary pioneer was laid George Lippard wrote in the Nineteenth Century (p. 27):
"The time has come when the authors of America, the men who view with pride the growth of a pure and elevated National literature, should go to the Quaker graveyard and bear the bones of Brockden Brown to that Laurel Hill which he loved in his boyhood; yes, let the remains of the martyr author sleep beneath the shadow of some dark pine, whose evergreen boughs, swaying to the winter wind, bend over the rugged cliff and sweep the waters of the Schuylkill as it rolls on amid its hilly shores, like an image of the rest which awaits the blessed in a better world. Then a solitary column of white marble, rising like a form of snow among the green boughs, shall record the neglect and woe and glory of the author's life, in a single name—Charles Brockden Brown."
"Wieland," the most powerful of Brown's novels, was published in Philadelphia in 1798. It was followed by "Ormond, or the Secret Witness" (1799), "Arthur Mervyn" (1799), "Edgar Huntley, or the Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker" (1801), "Clara Howard" and "Jane Talbot" (1801). All these romances dealt with sombre and mysterious or terrible subjects. "Wieland" was a story of monstrous crime occasioned through the agency of ventriloquism. "Arthur Mervyn" contained vivid descriptions of the yellow fever pestilence in Philadelphia in 1793. "Edgar Huntley" followed the fortunes of a somnambulist in the mountain fastnesses of Western Pennsylvania.
When Brown began to write "the churchyard romance" was in fashion, and novelists revelled in tales of horror and of terror, dwelling long and painfully upon the most loathsome details of some ghastly bit of fancy. It was the time of Lewis's "Tales of Terror," of Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," of Beckford's "Vathek," and of Mrs. Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho" and Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein." William Godwin, too, wrote ghostly stories of crime and supernatural agencies, and from Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown caught his style. The influence of Godwin is noticeable in Brown's first work, "Alcuin, a Dialogue on the Rights of Women" (1797). Godwin's "Falkland" and "Caleb Williams" are the models of "Wieland" and "Ormond."