A woman capable of recollection in danger, of warding off groundless panics, of discerning the true mode of proceeding, and profiting by her best res… - Charles Brockden Brown

Purposes fraught with horror, that shun the light, and contemplate the pollution of innocence are here engendered, and fostered, and reared to maturity.

Where was her bloom! These deadly and blood-suffused orbs but ill resemble the azure and ecstatic tenderness of her eyes. The lucid stream that meandered over that bosom, the glow of love that was wont to sit upon that cheek, are much unlike these livid stains and this hideous deformity. Alas! These were the traces of agony; the grip of the assassin had been here!

He describes him in general terms, as the most incomprehensible and formidable among men; as engaged in schemes, reasonably suspected to be, in the highest degree, criminal, but such as no human intelligence is able to unravel: that his ends are pursued by means which leave it in doubt whether he be not in league with some infernal spirit: that his crimes have hitherto been perpetrated with the aid of some unknown but desperate accomplices: that he wages a perpetual war against the happiness of mankind, and sets his engines of destruction at work against every object that presents itself.