Pericles and Demosthenes pronounced the funeral oration of the young Greeks who had fallen for a people that disappeared soon after themselves: in 1817, Brackenridge[527] celebrated the death of the young Americans whose blood gave birth to a nation. We have a national gallery of portraits of distinguished Americans, in four volumes octavo, and what is more singular, a biography containing the lives of over one hundred of the principal Indian chiefs. Logan[528], the Virginian chief, uttered these words before Lord Dunmore[529]: "Colonel Cresap[530], the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature that called on me for revenge. I have sought it; I have killed many.... Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one." Without loving nature, the Americans have applied themselves to the study of natural history. Townsend[531] set out from Philadelphia and traversed on foot the regions separating the Atlantic from the Pacific Ocean, jotting down numerous observations in his journal. Thomas Say[532], who travelled in Florida and in the Rocky Mountains, has published a work on American entomology. Wilson[533], a weaver who became an author, has left some rather finished pictures. [Sidenote: American literature.] To turn to literature proper, although it does not amount to much, there are, nevertheless, a few writers to be mentioned among the novelists and poets. Brown[534], the son of a Quaker, is the author of _Wieland_, which is the source and model of the novels of the new school. Unlike his fellow-countrymen: "I prefer," said Brown, "roaming in the forests to thrashing corn." Wieland, the hero of the novel, is a Puritan whom Heaven has commanded to kill his wife: "'I have brought thee hither,' says he to her, 'to fulfil a divine command. I am appointed thy destroyer, and destroy thee I must.' "Saying this, I seized her wrists. She shrieked aloud, and endeavoured to free herself from my grasp.... "'Wieland.... Am I not thy wife? And wouldst thou kill me? Thou wilt not; oh!... Spare me-spare-help, help--' "Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for help-for mercy." * Wieland strangles his wife, and experiences unspeakable delights by the side of her dead corpse. The horror of our modern inventions is here surpassed. Brown had trained his mind by reading _Caleb Williams_[535], and in _Wieland_ he copied a scene from _Othello._ At the present day, the American novelists Cooper[536] and Washington Irving[537] are obliged to take refuge in Europe to find chronicles and a public. The language of the great English writers has been "creolized," "provincialized," "barbarized," without gaining anything in energy in the midst of a virgin nature; it has become necessary to draw up catalogues of American expressions.