Charles Brockden Brown rivals Maturin in his terrible use of insanity for supernatural effect. The demented murderer in _Edgar Huntley_ gives an impression of mystery and awe that is unusual, while _Wieland_ with its religious mania produced by diabolic ventriloquism is even more impressive. Brown knew the effect of mystery and dread on the human mind and by slow, cumulative suggestion he makes us feel a creeping awe that the unwieldy machinery of pure Gothicism never could achieve. In studies of the morbid mentality he has few equals. For psychologic subtlety, for haunting horror, what is a crashing helmet or a dismembered ghost compared with Brown's Wieland? What are the rackings of monkish vindictiveness when set against the agonies of an unbalanced mind turned in upon itself? What exterior torture could so appeal to our sympathies as Wieland's despair, when, racked with religious mania, he feels the overwhelming conviction that the voice of God--which is but the fiendish trick of a ventriloquist--is calling him to murder his wife and children as a sacrifice to Deity? Such a tragedy of dethroned reason is intolerably powerful; the dark labyrinths of insanity, the gloom-haunted passages of the human mind, are more terrible to traverse than the midnight windings of Gothic dungeons. We feel that here is a man who is real, who is human, and suffering the extremity of anguish. Perhaps the most hideous aspect of insanity in the terror novel is that of the lycanthrope in _The Albigenses_. The tragic wolf-man imagines himself to be a mad wolf and cowers in his lair, glaring with gleaming, awful eyes at all who approach him, gnawing at a human head snatched from the graveyard. There are various other uses of insanity in the novel of the period, but these will serve to illustrate. The relation between insanity and the supernatural has been marked in later literature. * * * * * The use of portents is a distinct characteristic of the horror romance. Calamity is generally preceded by some sign of the supernatural influence at work, some presentment of dread. Crime and catastrophe are forefelt by premonition of woe and accompaniment of horror. In _The Accusing Spirit_ supernatural thunder heralds the discovery of the corpse in its winding-sheet, and the monk says, "Yes, some dread discovery is at hand. These phenomena are miraculous; when the common laws of nature are violated, the awful portents are not sent in vain." In _The Romance of the Castle_, an anonymous story, a woman hears the clock strike two and announces that she will be dead at three. This night an awful messenger sent from that dread tribunal from whose power there is no appeal, by signs terrific foretold my fate approached--foretold my final moment. "Catherine, behold!" was all that issued from the specter's lips, but in its hand it held a scroll which fixed my irrevocable doom, in letters which fascinated while they appalled my sight.