"'Wieland.... Am I not thy wife? And wouldst thou kill me? Thou wilt not; oh!... Spare me-spare-help, help—'
"Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for help-for mercy."
*
Wieland strangles his wife, and experiences unspeakable delights by the side of her dead corpse. The horror of our modern inventions is here surpassed. Brown had trained his mind by reading Caleb Williams[535], and in Wieland he copied a scene from Othello.
At the present day, the American novelists Cooper[536] and Washington Irving[537] are obliged to take refuge in Europe to find chronicles and a public. The language of the great English writers has been "creolized," "provincialized," "barbarized," without gaining anything in energy in the midst of a virgin nature; it has become necessary to draw up catalogues of American expressions.
As to the American poets, their language has charm, but they rarely rise above the common-place. Still, the Ode to the Evening Breeze, the Sunrise on the Mount, the Torrent, and some other poems, deserve a passing glance. Halleck[538] has sung the death of Bozzaris, and George Hill[539] has wandered among the Ruins of Athens:
Alas! for her, the beautiful, but lone,
Dethroned queen[540]!...
And again:
There sits the queen of temples[541]—grey and lone.
She, like the last of an imperial line,
Has seen her sister structures, one by one,
To time their gods and worshippers resign[542].
It pleases me, a traveller on the shores of Hellas and Atlantis, to hear the independent voice of a land unknown to antiquity lamenting the lost liberty of the old world.