Text: James Purves, “Edgar Allan Poe's Works,” Dublin University Magazine (Dublin, Ireland), vol. 86, whole no. 513, September 1875, pp. 296-306

[page 296:]

THE predilection shown for the terrible, is a strange phenomenon in literature. The writers of that school generally unfold history; their text is a historic fact. At other times, they weave their tale from less solid materials; ancient or medieval legends and superstitious rites often form the thread of their story. Many writers are not particular whether they borrow from Greek mythologies or from the romances of the middle ages, so long as they can get a pin on which they can hang their weird imaginings. There exists in all men a strong natural leaning towards the dark, and the mysterious. Superstition still exists among us, but in a changed form; and its strong hold has not been weakened by the change. As men become better educated, and more enlightened, they become more susceptible of strange, wayward conceits; curious, raw ideas; quaint tales, and outrageously ludicrous phantasies. They do not believe them, nor yet do they to a certain extent disbelieve them; they only derive from them a mental enjoyment and pleasant recreation. Their souls delight in all kinds of mythological tales, which cannot be too absurd and nonsensical on the one hand, nor too melancholy on the other. The pleasure increases in proportion with the non-belief; one's mind is firm and secure against [column 2:] them, unlike the ancients and their readers; but one loves to read them after the day's work is done, as a logician loves to read fallacies.

It is only a cultured mind that can appreciate these tales. An ordinarily educated man may perhaps be more affected at the story of a fine old ballad, but he cannot enjoy its poetic beauties, its graphic descriptions, or the nicety of details. He may fully understand the story, and realize it very strongly, but he cannot appreciate all those artistic touches which in truth form the very success of the poem. Before we can enjoy a poem as it ought to be enjoyed, we must be able to analyze it, and to do so, we must be possessed of some education. The uneducated only carry away the story, the educated will perhaps value one of the verses, a rhythmical line, or an original thought more than the entire poem. A rustic would as soon be startled by a leaf falling at his feet, as by a fine phrase; it requires a runaway horse, or something outré, to attract his attention.

He who feels an isolation even in the throng of a street from all mankind, whose thoughts lead him farther away from his neighbours the oftener he meets them; who is occasionally tired of the prosaic usefulness of those around him; who is unsatisfied with that which his hands touch, and who feels a [page 297:] deep vacuum within which can only be filled by something new, will readily grasp at anything which may afford him some knowledge of the weird and the terrible. He wants to get out of himself at times; he desires for a season to live in the mental creations of others, as he can find no rest in his own active brain. Mystery is part of life, but it is only some courageous adventurers who dare explore in her regions. His brain is saturated with strange dreams which pass and repass every minute, and every minute witnesses the passing to and fro of many phantastic thoughts. There ever revolved in his teeming fancy new and strange ideas, many of which come and go without the man becoming familiar with them. From whence they come and where they go to, concerns him not; that they are only concerns him. Around him is stern reality with money, power, society, which are to him so many smoky clouds; but in him exists the mysterious realm of dreamland. Night does not relieve him from the companionship of his thoughts, for, in the hours of sleep, phantasy plays her tricks with her numerous retinue in other ways, ard he rises in the morning with a fresh company of dreamers,

Hoffmann, the German writer, left courtly society and the brilliant saloon for the dark night and the intercourse with witches, spirits, and devils. The “Fairies’ Midwife” came to him, as it comes to all kindred minds, “in shape no bigger than an agate stone.” He might almost be said to have been one of those who “put faith in dreams as in the only realities.” But Hoffmann and Poe had no idle brains; they were rather too active; and it was this over activity they desired at times to get rid of, as most men desire to fill up their idle brains with the same recreations. These [column 2:] day-dreams begot of vain fantasy, clung close to them, so firm was their hold, that they did not even puff away from thence on being angered, but clung the more tenaciously to them.

The British Isles do not possess many followers of that school. Edgar Allan Poe was one of its students in America. The love for the weird springs generally from a mind cut off from the general current, it has either been born with the man, or grown afterwards at the feet of misfortune. Not unfrequently this passion deranges the man in whom it lodges, as water splits the cleft of a rock. Whenever it culminates in a passion with the possessor, it has a most detrimental effect. In the case of Poe it was part of his being, but it was not so intense as it was with Hoffmann. The German never read a newspaper; the dreams of his black-shadowed imagination was his all-in-all world. Poe, on the other hand, lived by, and wrote for, newspapers and periodicals. In the prosaic, paragraph-work of an American newspaper office, he had to bring his common sense into play. Dreams aud fantasies were therefrom strictly excluded, not being on business. That he wrote well for the newspapers on all general topics, and equally well on strange and weird subjects also, shows the universality and power of the man. In this respect he rises above Hoffmann; but that such a fine intellect and poetic fancy should ever have required to perform the drudgery-work of a paragraphist, seems to one like a thoroughbred horse harnessed to the heavy plough in a stubble field. It is distinctly evidenced through all his writings that he believed in what he wrote, and did not write with his belief outside, as a critic standing in the cool shade. Effusions they were in the highest sense, written to relieve not [page 298:] to explain. Both Hoffmann and he were not unlike Orestes, who, when he had murdered his mother Clytemnestra, and felt the furies of her vengeance coming upon him, exclaimed, —

In such moods the thunder of Poe's power is most powerfully discernible; it is seen in the overcast sky and the heavy, clammy air. The scenes he depicts have a realism about them, they are drawn with a painter's hand, guided by a true painter's eye. It is difficult to say whether the poet or the painter excels in many of them, so excellently does he perform the offices of each; but every sketch is lighted up with touches of beauty, while the words roll on as some notes of music. The intensity of the writing is something marvellous; it is graven with a powerful pen on steel for ever. “We poets,” said Goethe to Henry Crabbe Robinson when talking of his “Carnival of Rome,” which he had written to get rid of the thoughts that had collected themselves on the subject, — “We poets are much more matter-of-fact people than they who are not poets have any idea of; and it was the truth and reality which made that writing so popular.” All works before they can become realities to other people must have first been realities and truths to the writers, born in travail and cradled in intense affection. How profoundly his day-dreams and his night-dreams must have affected Poe we can in part understand from [column 2:] the firm hold they have upon us the readers.

Was Poe sane?* Could a man filled with the fancies and humours which he was filled with, be considered sane? Doctors may answer in the negative, but they would thereby affirm, at least after the men were dead, that many of the brightest intellects the world ever possessed were madmen. We have no faith in pleas of insanity, especially when set up for the first time after the man's death. We look at them with the same suspicion as a judge does at the plea when it is set up for a criminal. To affirm that Poe was mad is a most unfriendly plea. Strickly speaking, it would be by no means difficult to adduce facts in the lives of most of us that would of themselves shake considerably our sanity in the eyes of others. But in literature, where there are no wills and deeds of settlement to set aside, it ought to be a rule that no man's sanity should be questioned when no such question was raised in his lifetime by those who knew him. According to the old story, Hercules was afflicted with madness as the punishment for being so near the gods. It would be absurd, however, to apply the same story to Poe. Whatever ruin may befall men like him it is nonsensical to attribute it to insanity; it would take away from him all the manliness he possessed, and would place him in the pauper's shoes beseeching charity from us. Until genius is proved to be a sign of madness we will always believe in Poe's sanity. His life showed him to be a way- ward, erratic being, but no more. Madness may be akin to genius, as it is said to be akin to wit, but the disease always shows itself in the [page 299:] man's writings, and who will in the wide world be found to assert that he wrote anything which shows signs of such a disease?

From the man's life we now come with an easy transition to his works.

We have long thought that Poe's poems are like fallen leaves in the outward world. Few of his poems were written in the heyday of summer, none were written in the harvest field. They fell like the leaves in autumn; they only fell when the dew wet the grass, and the frost had bitten their stems to the death. They are rich in colour, and tinged with beauty. In this respect his poems possess a biographical interest. He was not a poet by profession. He only became a poet when some shadow had crossed his soul, when suffering and sorrow had been his visitors. As suffering is common to all as the sparks fly upward, so it was part of his being to seek relief from his intense feelings by confessing them on paper.

That it is a relief to many minds the transference of one's day and night engrossing thoughts to paper is beyond question; but it is only a very finely strung mind that can be so much harassed by its own thoughts to that extent. These biographical poems of Poe are just what another man like Crabbe Robinson would have entered in prose in the diary of his life.

Having been possessed of a poetic mind, and having only written poems on such events and feelings in his own life as stung him to the quick, they could not but reach the deepest recesses of our heart. There is not a poem he wrote but tells; they come upon us, as they flowed from him, with a direct force and a freshness of feeling. He has written [column 2:] fewer poems than any other well-known American poet, yet he has won a wider fame. Indeed, we doubt if ever there has lived in modern or ancient times a poet who wrote so few poems as Poe, and acquired so great a reputation.

It is as a poet that Poe will be best known. His poems are the gold, his tales the silver, and his criticisms the copper of his wealth. His coppers he scattered very liberally. He entertained a very strong opinion that the highest poetic genius could, for the best display of its own powers, be most advantageously employed in a short poem, a poem that could be read within an hour. Whether or no that opinion be based on sound poetic principles, we do not here pause to consider. Poe has, however, shown beyond doubt that he himself was able to write poems of the very highest order of true poetry within such limits. His poems are essentially poems of the mind and affections. They can be appreciated by all nations; they are not disfigured by any local signs; they are written for all mankind. He owes not this width to the power that love songs and love poems usually possess; though he wrote poems of which love was the moving power, there was no maudlin inanity about them; they were manly, strong in outline, and strong even in the beautiful delicate details. They are such poems as are produced only where tender, trusting love has wooed a strong, manly intellect. Thus all his effusions are toned into a beautiful harmony by the two feelings, and find their way into the hearts and minds of all readers; therein his poems resemble very much the poems of her whom he admired, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The moving passion of the poems is very strong, but he curbs it, keeps it well in hand, and does not allow it to run away with him. He accomplishes [page 300:] his aim without exhausting himself or tiring his reader. The reserve of the man is also seen in his poems; he gives us nothing superfluous: how unlike Byron and Wordsworth in this respect.

His poetry has been objected to as lacking spontaneity, the same objection which many of our best critics take to Tennyson. It is perhaps of little moment, as it affects not the genius of the poet. A poet may be very spontaneous in his thoughts, but in moulding them into verse he may press them into compact strength. Another poet's thoughts may be the very reverse of spontaneous, but in committing them to paper, he may, by artful rules, like Oliver Goldsmith, give them the appearance of a spontaneous expression. Spontaneity is a trick of style in the vast number of writers. It seems to us to be of very small importance in estimating poetry, whether the lines come spontaneously, or whether they were carefully collected and put together with great pains and study, so long as the poem itself is deserving of our admiration. “Whoso knocks,” says Plato, “at the door of poesy, untouched with the Muse's frenzy — fondly persuading himself that art alone will make him a thorough poet — neither be nor his works will ever attain perfection; but are destined, for all their cold propriety, to be eclipsed by the effusions of the inspired madman.” In truth, this objection, — if it be an objection, which we by no means admit, — would apply pre-eminently to “the divine Milton,” who was long in choosing and late of beginning. It is only the effusions of the inspired that the world preserve; but although inspiration tingles the hearts of all men alike, they express themselves in their own manner. That spontaneity of expression neither makes nor mars a poet, is fully evidenced by the [column 2:] fact that nearly all our medium poets write very spontaneously, while our master-pieces were written after years of laborious study. But, as one of the characters in George Eliot's “Romola” says, “An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.” Take only two of Poe's poems, “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” both highly and elaborately finished pieces of art, and where can be found any two poems by any one poet which possess to so great a degree the vis vitæ, which make realities out of words?

The “Raven” is beyond all question Poe's master poem. He explains in his “Essay on the Philosophy of Composition” (Works, vol. iii. p. 266), how he thought upon the subject and wrought it out. Many incline to the opinion that the elaborateness of its design, as therein set forth, never occurred to the poet before, but after he wrote the poem, and that the article was written to expound ideas suggested after its composition. We see no reason to disbelieve Poe's statement. That it was well studied and wrought out in the poet's mind, few of any experience will doubt; there is much action, and there are a great many small points of detail brought out, both of which are entirely against spontaneous effusions. Besides, the very statements he made in that article could not have gained him any great public favour; indeed, it was calculated to create, and has created, a feeling against him. Many amateurs think the poem a juggler's feat, and it is only when they have tried to imitate it that they find there is more than art in it. “Most writers — poets in especial — prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition — and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought [page 301:] — at the true purposes seized only at the last moment — at the innumerable ‘glimpses of idea,’ that arrived not at the maturity of full view — at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable — at the cautious selections and rejections — at the painful erasures and interpolations, — in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders, and demon-traps, the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.” (Ibid., p. 267.)

Poets are what we call inspired to a certain extent, and when not inspired their writings are of little value; but they write desiring to be read, or to be paid, or to become popular. To attain a reputation they must write, and to write requires premeditation. They have, in the sense of Poe, to exercise a great amount of worldly wisdom before they write, and this, though it draws the veil from off the poet's (private) inner chamber, is undeniable. The picture of “The Raven” is, no doubt, such as would occur to many gifted with a good imagination; an image that has found its way now and then into most of our heads; but its simplicity is the simplicity that always is the feature of any great poem. It is simple after it is written; most of us have, at ‘one time or other, had a raven in our study. The poem does not strike us, the first time we read it, as strange and out-of-the-way. It is like the voice of a friend long lost sight of; it is the mirrored reflection of thoughts lying in a retired nook, and only felt by us now and then; it has a biographical interest to us all, and is more or less associated with some epoch in our own lives.

To account for its very great popularity, we must look at it [column 2:] closely. What strikes us at first sight is the tremendous reality of the picture. Brooding over it there is a dull, heavy melancholy, which brings the tears to our eyes, as the thunder cloud in a wintry day discharges its loud peals, and lets the vapour fall. The melancholy is not affected; it is real, and falls upon us with a steadying sombreness, So rich it is in poetic beauty that we never tire of it; like a picture of a master painter, in it we always see something fresh; like a deep-toned symphony, we never listen to it but we experience new enjoyment. Light music palls on our ears on its being repeated, but a fine requiem brings always new ideas, and creates new aspirations. It reaches the very soul. Several times it has seemed to us as the voice of a rich, far-carrying bell of an old cathedral, echoing its deep-toned music in the stillness of the midday or evening over the broad fields; it sounds in our ears as the voice of some mysterious one, and in the quietness we stay and listen as if we heard an unearthly tongue. Like all truly great effusions it contains more within its lines than the mere words or pictures; it is emblematical of a mournful, never-ending Remembrance, which creeps closer to us than any thoughts. No American poet has yet produced so great a poem. Look, for instance, into some of the beautiful expressions and rolling lines with which it is charged. What can be finer than the two opening lines? —

They are only equalled by the two opening lines in Burns’ “Tam o’ Shanter” for their cadency and musical beauty. Take, again, the [page 302:] fine expressions, and clear, powerful descriptions in these lines: —

And what can be more graphic than the line? —

There are thrown here and there, with a hand that has plenty to give, many splendid thoughts and descriptions. It is one of those poems which lasts, a companion we never tire speaking with; its power is not evanescent, but strengthens with age.

“Once as yet,” very beautifully says Mr. A. C. Swinburne, referring to America and her poets, “and once only, has there sounded out of it all one pure note of original song worth singing, and echoed from the singing of no other man — a note of song neither wide nor deep, but utterly true, rich, clear, and native to the singer; the short, as music, subtle, and simple, and sombre, and sweet, of Edgar Poe.” In that sentence, a model of fine writing, we have the several characteristic beauties of Poe's poems condensed. Profoundly true are the words that they contain “one pure note of original song,” “and echoed from the singing of no other man.” The reason of that is not far to seek; we find it in the [column 2:] preface to his poems. “With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations of mankind.” (“Under the Microscope,” pp. 54-5.)

His poem, “The Bells,” not only shows the great mastery he had over words, but also exhibits great power of imagination. It is something after the style of “The Raven;” and certainly has far more strength in its effect than the same idea as wrought out by Dickens in “Barnaby Rudge.” Very many of his poems, for instance, “Ulaleime [[Ulalume]],” “Lenore,” “Annabel Lee,” “To One in Paradise,” “Tamerlane,” all refer to the same person, to her whom he loved in his early youth with such a pure and all-absorbed devotion. It is their key-note; and, lover-like, he never tired tuning his heart with the sounds of such rare memorial songs. From the ever-recurring theme; the strong, glowing warmth; the great earnestness and yearning of the poet, we can understand the large possession she had of his entire being. Each poem differs in expression, but all unite in swelling her ineffaceable memory. A month, a year, several years elapse, but time's hand has not dimmed the picture; the waters have been gathering, and when the sluice is raised they swell out with greater force than before. So in “Annabel Lee” he says: —

More exquisitely does he express [page 303:] himself in his sweet little poem, “To One in Paradise.” The opening and concluding of the four verses surpass for their very great richness of exquisite poetry and lyrical beauty anything he wrote. They are redolent with most sweet music; they are two full-blown roses, and out colour all other flowers; they are the most precious plants in the conservatory, no other fragrance is felt where they are.

Beautiful though that verse is the following is more beautiful still, —

In “Tamerlane,” which he wrote in his youth, he writes with more soul and feeling, —

To us “Tamerlane” is one of, if not the most, interesting poem, he wrote, It is a psychological study. We have there the virgin feelings of love, the strong feelings of a first-born passion written in the natural heat of youth, and written [column 2:] by one with a poetic gift. It issues forth like molten iron from the furnace, red-hot; fierce in its fresh possession, yet impressible by her to whom it owes its birth. But along with the newness of love, its sweetness and frenzy, comes sadness, “the winged strife.” In this new kingdom, this newly discovered precious mine was his soul and body. “I saw no heaven — but in her eyes.” Can words be more expressive than these, can pictures on canvas be more apparent to the eye than that, can similes teach us more? Many pages, books, teach us less. It is an arrow shot straight to the heart.

There are three other poems to which we desire to draw attention, not only for their poetic beauty but for their biographical interest. They are “Israfel,” which was written in his youth; “For Annie;” and “To My Mother.” The former bears many traces that it was written in youth, some of the verses run awkwardly, while one or two of the rhymes are hauled in; the two last verses are splendid, especially the last: —

The last two were written in his manhood, they have a robustness of thought, and a fine poetic feeling. “To My Mother” is a gem, although in the form of a sonnet; a pure soul breathes through it. The title is a little misleading, Mrs. Clemm, his mother-in-law, being the party addressed; but to Poe she was a mother, and more than a mother. His own mother was the mother of himself, but Mrs. Clemm was, as he finally put it, — [page 304:]

He has not written any light, gay, vivacious poems such as we are now accustomed to see in magazines; he did not write poetry to amuse himself or us; he only wrote in that form when he had something special to say, some lodging thought to unburden himself of, some message to deliver. To him poetry was a sacred form of expression; for ordinary work he used prose. This is instanced in his. ‘For Annie,” a thank-offering for his recovery from the “fever called ‘Living,’” wherein he uses a very characteristic expression, “pitiless pain.” He was notably one of those who “learn in suffering what they teach in song;” his verses were but the expressions of —

He was cradled into poetry on the lap of sorrow; his muse is sicklied over with the pale cast of grief, and his deep-toned, richly-melodious music is in keeping with the heart-stricken and high-souled man.

Having now exhausted the “place for gold,” we now come to the “vein for the silver” of Poe's works, His tales and stories were written for his bread; they too often bear the marks of forced work, and very many of them lack that richness of detail and of thought, that spontaneity and leisure alone can give. We doubt very much if the reprinting of all his tales is a prudent step; we certainly do not think that those now published for the first time will maintain Poe's reputation as a tale writer. It would have been better if Mr. Ingram had only published a [column 2:] selection; his best tales have been published over and again, his worst should not have been reprinted. No man who writes for a living ever intends, or would even allow, the papers so hastily put together, to be placed side by side with his more ambitious and better efforts.

The gloom that is distinctly visible in his poems gathers into heavy thunder-clouds in his tales. Many are as black as midnight, without any moon or stars to light up the scene. The stories come upon us as the wide sweep and heavy roar of many waters; in our loneliness they rush upon us, and carry all tender plants and beautiful flowers before them. He pictures graphically the land of darkness, and the shadow of death, a land of darkness as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without “any order, and where the light is as darkness.” They are fresh and vigorous, but so are all thunder-storms. They are original, but so are the trials of murderers. They are weird and gloomy, but so are the sounds that escape from the bird of night, the owl. But over all this gloom, his imagination plays with a vivid fervour, and wild freshness. For him the terrible, the horrible, the fantastical, had a strange fascination.

In his tales of the horrible he is painfully minute, every little weird incident, every bit of black paint is, put on the canvas. In many tales the terrible minuteness of death strikes the reader more than the entire fact of the story: the incidents he used may to some appear trivial, but in his hands they formed part of the working out of the story, his picture would be incomplete without them; it would lose half of its power. We refer particularly to “Mesmeric Revelation;” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdedemar;” “A Descent into the Maelström;” The Black Cat;” “The Pit and Pendulum.” Of humour [page 305:] he had exceedingly little. He had no laugh and very little sunshine. To wit he had no pretensions, and when he plays a joke there is a ghastliness about it. Probably, the lightest of his stories is the “Spectacles;” but even then the lightness depends upon the incidents of the story, and not on the manner in which he told it. His three tales, “Berenice,” “Leiga [[Ligeia]],” and “Morella,” are the most exquisite, choice, and beautiful of his prose writings. They are poems. They give us an insight into the constitution of the man, his longings, his past joys, and his day-dreams. They all refer to the one person, to the ever memorable Leiga [[Ligeia]], who was more to him than woman is to an ordinary mortal. In them we have an idea of the great strength of his love, how it filled and absorbed his entire being; and we can understand how great the destruction and desolation must have been, when the idol was removed from out the chamber, when the eye could rest on nothing in its place, but only look in upon memory and feed upon past recollections. Memory revels in the lost idol, magnifies her beauties, lauds her worth, and increases her charms until the mind is delirious; then comes the dreadful waking into poverty of the present, from the vast richness of the past. So when he is awakened from his dreamings into the past, by the pressing cares of the present, he finds that the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day. It was the only happiness left to him to dream of her. No one will doubt that these tales were founded on his own experience; they ring with truth; they rush on with the waters of a pent-up devotion and long-lost love; every page contains lines of pure heart music. There is no plot in them, no attempt at analysis, no endeavour to be terrible, he only relieves his [column 2:] mind of the visions which lodged in it day and night; they are the utterances of his own heart, soliloquies uttered from heart to heart. We have little hesitation in placing them in point of human interest above and beyond everything he wrote, and we could only have wished that he had written more of these beautiful, rich-swelling poems. We would rather see his reputation founded on these tales than on the pseudo-detective stories.

We have had little difficulty in estimating Poe's position as a poet and a writer of tales, but we experience considerable difficulty in estimating his criticisms. The functions of a critic were to him very high and sacred. So honest, high-toned, truth-seeking were his criticisms, that he seems to have written on his oath; there is no looseness of expression, no slipshod work; every sentence tells, every word, for his words were very carefully and correctly chosen. In America no man was so fearless in expressing his opinions; his approval could not be purchased by popular opinion, nor could his disapproval be obtained by publishers or friends. In his eyes a critic was a public official, who should say what he means in a straightforward mannner [[manner]], irrespective of what his constituents think. Few men have had a higher or more profound sense of its responsibilities; to protect the guild of literature from being disgraced by any unworthy member; to thin its ranks of those whose souls could not rise above vanity, egotism, money grubbing; to burst the wind-bags, to clear the ranks of the profession of those who were totally unworthy to be dubbed authors or poets, and to expose the thieves and unprincipled writers. He exercised his duties too well, alas! for his own reputation; he has been rewarded with foul calumny by the host of those insignificant, [page 306:] worthless writers, which were then so numerous across the Atlantic. His criticisms contain many fine thoughts and ideas, especially the short paragraphs which styles “Marginalia.” He was a profound analyst; he was well versed in the machinery of thoughts; unsatisfied with the surface he always looked for principles; his criticisms were always supported by some leading general truths.

Taken altogether, Poe is the most remarkable genius that America has yet given birth to. He was, as we have seen, a many-sided man, he could write well about anything. Many authors have excelled him in several departments, but not one has come near to him as a poet, a tale writer, an essayist, and a critic combined. Emerson is richer and fuller in his essays; Longfellow possesses more soul and heart in his poems; Hawthorne has a lighter fancy, is a more pleasant companion, and writes more finished tales; and Lowell has a better critical faculty; but any one of them cannot be compared [column 2:] to Poe for his many gifts and accomplishments. He stands pre-eminent above them all in that respect. He is perhaps the greatest universal American genius. They have sweeter and pleasanter singers, but none are so powerful as he, not one that stirs us to our very heart's core. And though he loved the black domains of night, and courted the company of all her grim and motley and weird retinue, there ever and anon appeared those angel faces whom he had loved long since and lost for a while.

His poems are the richly-varied strains of music, now rising, now falling, which a skilled player alone can bring from a well-worn time-marked instrument; the music is the sweeter in correspondence with the wear and tear of the instrument. His tales are the picture galleries, in which are hung the strange creations, and curiously shaped imagination, of the artist. His criticisms are like the clear, biting frost of winter; occasionally the cold winter day is warmed with the sun's rays, but the night falls with piercing keenness.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 296:]

* “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” edited by John H. Ingram. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. 1875.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 298:]

* Mr. Andrew Wilson, the writer of the most admirable article on “Infanti Perduti” in the Edinburgh Essays, raises the question, and inclines very strongly to the opinion that Poe suffered from insanity.