Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis ludicrously weak.  Thus the hero of his first novel, Wieland (whose father anticipates “Old Krook,” in Dickens’s Bleak House, by dying of spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story.  Similarly in Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena of sleep-walking.  Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in Edgar Huntley, and his graphic account in Arthur Mervyn of the yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793.  Shelley was an admirer of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian, are of the same abnormal and speculative type.

Another book which falls within this period was the Journal, 1774, of John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, which has received the highest praise from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others.  “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart,” wrote Lamb, “and love the early Quakers.”  The charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and innocence of feeling, the “deep inward stillness” peculiar to the people called Quakers.  Apart from his constant use of certain phrases peculiar to the Friends Woolman’s English is also remarkably graceful and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and tender and humble in its sincerity.  When not working at his trade as a tailor Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far as Boston and Nantucket.  He was under a “concern” and a “heavy exercise” touching the keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did much to influence the Quakers against slavery.  His love went out, indeed, to all the wretched and oppressed; to sailors, and to the Indians in particular.  One of his most perilous journeys was made to the settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna.  Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint naivete with which he expresses them, may make the modern reader smile, but it is a smile which is very close to a tear.  Thus, when in England—­where he died in 1772—­he would not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach, because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter nights, and were sometimes frozen to death.  “So great is the hurry in the spirit of this world that, in aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan.”