It has been asserted that we are a gloomy people; it is currently reported that the Hippocrene in which of old the Heliconian muses bathed their soft skins, is now fed only with their tears; that instead of branches of luxuriant olive, these maidens, now older grown and wise, present to their devout adorers twigs of suggestive birch and thorny staves, by whose aid these mournful priests wander gloomily up and down the rugged steeps of the past.  We have begun to believe that our writers are afflicted with a sort of myopy that shuts out effectually sky and star and sea, and sees only the pebbles and thistles by the dusty roadside.  Truly, the prospect is at first disheartening.  The great Byron, who wept in faultless metre, and whose aristocratic maledictions flow in graceful waves that caress where they mean to stifle, has so poisoned our ‘well of English undefiled,’ that wise men now drink from it warily, and only after repeated filterings and skillful analyses by the Boerhaaves of the press.  And Poe, who, with all the great poet’s faults, possessed none of his few genial features, has painted the fatal skull and cross-bones upon our banners, that should own only the oriflamme.  Yet it is Poe whom the English critic honors as exceeding all our authors in intensity, and approaching more nearly to genius than they all.

Now may St. Loy defend us!  At the proposition of Poe’s intensity we do not demur.  All of us who have shrieked in infancy at the charnel-house novelettes of imprudent nurses, shivered in childhood at the mysterious abbeys and concealed tombs of Anne Radcliffe, or rushed in horror from the apparition of the dead father of the Archivarius of Hoffman, tumbling his wicked son down stairs in the midst of the onyx quarrel, will willingly and with trembling fidelity bear witness to the intensity of Poe.  He was indeed our Frankenstein (of whom many prototypes do abound), wandering in the Cimmerian regions of thought, the graveyards of the mind, and veiling his monstrous creations with the filmy drapery of rhyme and the mists of a perverted reason.  In his sad world eternal night reigns and the sun is never seen.

  ’Tristis Erinnys,
  Praetulit infaustas sanguinolenta faces,’

by whose red light awed audiences see the fruit of his labors.

But what right has he to a place in our van, who never asked our sympathy, whose every effort was but to widen the gulf between him and his fellow-man, whose sword was never drawn in defence of the right?  Genius!  The very word is instinct with nobility and heartiness.  Genius clasps hands with true souls everywhere:  it wakes the chord of brotherhood in rude hearts in hovels, and quickens the pulses under the purple and ermine of palaces.  It has a smile for childhood and a reverent tone for white-haired age.  Its clasp takes in the frail flower bending from slender stems and the stars in their courses.  There is laughter in its soul, and a huge banquet-table there to which all are welcome.  And to us, on its borders, come the summer-breath of Paestum roses and the aroma of the rich red wine of Valdepenas; and there toasts are given to the past and to the future, for genius knows no nation nor any age.  It sparkles along the current of history, and under its warm smile deserts blossom like the rose.