attend it; he dwells on the withering sensation that falls so heavily on the heart in the streets of the once busy and crowded city, now deserted and silent, save only where the wheels of the melancholy hearse are heard to rumble along the pavement. Our author not unfrequently succeeds in conveying more to the heart by the skilful selection of a single circumstance than would have flowed from a multitude of petty details. It is the art of the great masters of poetry and painting.
The same year in which Brown produced the first part of "Arthur Mervyn," he entered on the publication of a periodical entitled The Monthly Magazine and American Review, a work that, during its brief existence, which terminated in the following year, afforded abundant evidence of its editor's versatility of talent and the ample range of his literary acquisitions. Our hero was now fairly in the traces of authorship. He looked to it as his permanent vocation; and the indefatigable diligence with which he devoted himself to it may at least serve to show that he did not shrink from his professional engagements from any lack of industry or enterprise.
The publication of "Arthur Mervyn" was succeeded not long after by that of Edgar Huntly; or, the Adventures of a Sleepwalker, a romance presenting a greater variety of wild and picturesque adventure, with more copious delineations of natural scenery, than is to be found in his other fictions; circumstances, no doubt, possessing more attractions
