Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

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VI. Charles Brockden Brown

When, in 1834, the historian Jared Sparks undertook the publication of a “Library of American Biography,” he included in the very first volume — with a literary instinct most creditable to one so absorbed in the severer paths of history — a memoir of Charles Brockden Brown by W. H. Prescott. It was an appropriate tribute to the first imaginative writer worth mentioning in America,--he having been born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 17, 1771, and died there of consumption on February 22, 1810,--and to one who was our first professional author. He was also the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic, upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands towards an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of this influence, concealed doors opened in lonely houses, fatal epidemics laid cities desolate, secret plots were organized, unknown persons from foreign lands died in garrets, usually leaving large sums of money; the honor of innocent women was constantly endangered, though usually saved in time; people were subject to somnambulism and