The novels of Charles Brockden Brown, consisting of Wieland;or, The transformation. Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the year 1793. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a sleep-walker. Jane Talbot. Ormond; or, The secret witness. Clara Howard; or, The enthusiasm of love. With a memoir of the author.

THE ENTHUSIASM OF LOVE.

45

love. He was willing to bestow her upon me, and had,
without doubt, gained the concurrence of her mother in
this scheme. It was thus he meant to insure the felicity
and establish the fortune of his pupil.
There is somewhat in the advantages of birth and rank,
in the habit of viewing objects through the medium of
books, that gives a sacred obscurity, a mysterious elevation, to human beings. I had been familiar with the
names nobility and royalty, but the things themselves
had ever been shrouded in an awe-creating darkness.
Their distance had likewise produced an interval which
I imagined impossible for me to overpass. They were
objects to be viewed, like the Divinity, from afar. The
only sentiments which they could excite were reverence
and wonder. That I should ever pass the mound which
separated my residence and my condition from theirs
was utterly incredible.
The ideas annexed to the term peasant are wholly inapplicable to the tillers of the ground in America; but
our notions are the offspring more of the books we read,
than of any other of our external circumstances. Our
books are almost wholly the productions of Europe, and
the prejudices which infect us are derived chiefly from
this source. These prejudices may be somewhat rectified
by age and by converse with the world, but they flourish
in full vigour in youthful minds, reared in seclusion and
privacy, and undisciplined by intercourse with various
classes of mankind. In me they possessed an unusual
degree of strength. My words were selected and defined
according to foreign usages, and my notions of dignity
were modelled on a scale which the Revolution has completely taken away. I could never forget that my condition was that of a peasant; and, in spite of reflection,
I was the slave of those sentiments of self-contempt and
humiliation which pertain to that condition elsewhere,
though chimerical and visionary on the western side of
the Atlantic.
My ambition of dignity and fortune grew out of this
supposed inferiority of rank. Experience had taught me
how slender are the genuine wants of a human being, and
made me estimate, at their true value, the blessings of com