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Seldom has a poor mortal been more abused or less understood than the subject of the following verses. With a mind tuned to the highest harmonies, and gifted with most surprising powers of analysis, nothing escaped the terrible anatomy of his critiques. In reading some of leis reviews one feels the sensation of cold steel searching through, the warm flesh. The crude field of our young National Literature, with its- rank “tares of haste” and flowers of more than tropical luxuriance, afforded ample exercise for the pruning-knife of the critic; and who was better fitted for the task than POE? A diamond of the first water, with him mediocrity was almost a crime. His onslaught upon the “literary lights” of the day was commenced and carried on without favor, love, Or mercy. Authors, poets, novelists, tale-writers, amateur contributors to magazines, many of whom had obtained their diplomas from public opinion, and were reposing quietly on their laurels perfectly assured of their fee-simple right to immortal fame, were suddenly aroused, as from a dream, at beholding all the labored and gorgeous net-work of their fancy dissolved, as if by magic, into “thin and unsubstantial air.” “Old fogies” of the classic school; modern propagandists, worshipping at the shrines of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and other “latter-day saints;” the Carlyles, Emersons, and Parkers, with their strong scent of Dutch pipes, German beer, and transcendentalism; Young America, with its literary blood, thunder, and fillibusterisin — all felt more or less the depleting effects of his critical cathartics. The fame of many, which had gone up like the sky-rocket, by the disenchantment of his pen came down like the stick.

But the reformer’s mission- is an ungrateful one, even in the best cause. The healthy tone imparted to our national literature by POE’s searching criticisms plead but a poor apology with those who felt their scorching effects. He had no mercy on a certain class of writers in his life; and they, in their turn, had no mercy on him after his death. Scarcely were his ashes cold in the ground when the whole pack was let loose, “Tray, Blanch, Sweetheart, and all.”

Among other things it was charged that his nature was a “moral vacuum;” that he had the most obscure conceptions, if any, of moral rectitude, the holiness of virtue, the sanctity of the affections, even the common proprieties of life, &c. And yet it is well known by those familiar with him in his more’ intimate relations that he was a most loving husband, a devoted son, (to a mother-in-law who had not the strong ties of blood to attach him,) and that his heart was alive to the most genial impulses of our nature. It is well known, also, that such was the peculiarity of his organization that the smallest quantity of intoxicating drink produced, as has been termed, a kind of moral insanity in his mind, and indeed distorted his whole nature.

It was remarked by the lovely and lamented FANNY OSGOOD — that sweetest embodiment of the poetic ideal in woman’s nature — that “none but a woman could judge of EDGAR A. POE.” Ah, true! none but a woman, with her refined and holy sympathies, could catch, with artistic skill, the delicate shades, the ever-varying lights, the “lines within lines” of such an exquisitely-wrought piece of God’s workmanship.

There is a class of minds so isolated from their kind — so far removed beyond the sphere of our own thoughts, feeling, and existence — that it would be cruel injustice to submit them to the Protean standard of our common humanity. Poor Ishmaelites in the desert of this life, the very loneliness of their fate should dispose us to suspend our final judgment, and leave them to the Great Master who said “judge not lest ye shall be judged.”

England has her magnificent palace of the dead, in which are enshrined the mortal remains of those mighty intellects who have shed a glory as of Heaven on her name. Shall not, then, our own gifted son of genius — the poor minstrel who sorrowed through the gloom of mortality while his teeming brain poured forth its rich flood of ideal splendor on the world — shall not his memory at least find an honored resting-plane in the hearts of the good and noble and charitable of our land?

WASHINGTON, D. C.