...anding as an author; Brownson, one of the most forceful but erratic figures of the time, minister, editor, politician, and novelist-beginning life as a Presbyterian and becoming in turn Universalist, Unitarian , transcendentalist, and Roman Catholic; Very and Cranch, two of the poets of the period, the former probably the extreme mystic of the whole group, a victim for a time of religious mania, the latter ...