extended to the sufferings of the whole race. But the extraordinary
reputation and circulation given to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by the
world-wide interest in its subject, could not be sustained when public
interest in that subject declined; and the volume which at one time
occupied the attention of the whole civilized world, fell into
comparative obscurity when its mission was accomplished.



IX.

Works of fiction occupied with purely imaginary or supernatural
subjects have been comparatively rare. While Byron, Shelley and his
wife were living at the Lake of Geneva, a rainy week kept them indoors,
and all three occupied themselves with reading or inventing ghost
stories. Mrs. Shelley, who was the daughter of Godwin the novelist, and
who inherited his intensity of imagination, reproduced the impressions
then made upon her mind in the remarkable but disagreeable romance of
"Frankenstein." The story is related by a young student, who creates a
monstrous being from materials gathered in the tomb and the
dissecting-room. When the creature is made complete with bones,
muscles, and skin, it acquires life and commits atrocious crimes. It
murders a friend of the student, strangles his bride, and finally comes
to an end in the Northern seas. While some parts of the story are
written with considerable power, the general effect is exceedingly
unpleasant. Bulwer Lytton's "Zanoni," a peculiarly fanciful work,
unfolds the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. In "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland," the freaks and vagaries of the imagination in sleep are
vividly traced. The curious mixture of the actual and the unreal, the
merging of wholly different ideas in one conception, so frequent in