The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 1 eBook

He was the voice of beauty and of woe,
Passion and mystery and the dread unknown;
Pure as the mountains of perpetual snow,
Cold as the icy winds that round them moan,
Dark as the eaves wherein earth’s thunders groan,
Wild as the tempests of the upper sky,
Sweet as the faint, far-off celestial tone of angel
    whispers, fluttering from on high,
And tender as love’s tear when youth and beauty die.

In the two and a half score years that have elapsed since Poe’s death he has come fully into his own.  For a while Griswold’s malignant misrepresentations colored the public estimate of Poe as man and as writer.  But, thanks to J. H. Ingram, W. F. Gill, Eugene Didier, Sarah Helen Whitman and others these scandals have been dispelled and Poe is seen as he actually was-not as a man without failings, it is true, but as the finest and most original genius in American letters.  As the years go on his fame increases.  His works have been translated into many foreign languages.  His is a household name in France and England-in fact, the latter nation has often uttered the reproach that Poe’s own country has been slow to appreciate him.  But that reproach, if it ever was warranted, certainly is untrue.

W. H. R.

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Edgar Allan poe{*1}

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The situation of American literature is anomalous.  It has no centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes.  It is, divided into many systems, each revolving round its several suns, and often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way.  Our capital city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart from which life and vigor radiate to the extremities, but resembles more an isolated umbilicus stuck down as near a’s may be to the centre of the land, and seeming rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to serve any present need.  Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its literature almost more distinct than those of the different dialects of Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one of her own, of which some articulate rumor barely has reached us dwellers by the Atlantic.

Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism of contemporary literature.  It is even more grateful to give praise where it is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often seduces the iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she writes what seems rather like an epitaph than a criticism.  Yet if praise be given as an alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into any man’s hat.  The critic’s ink may suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls or of sugar.  But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding place of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we usually find mixed with it.