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.
~~~~~~ End of Text ~~~~~~
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EdgarAllanpoe{*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.
