And Poe?  With a mind neither well balanced nor unprejudiced, and an imagination that mistook the distorted fantasies of a fevered brain for the pure impulses of some mysterious muse, and gave the reins to coursers that even Phaeton would have feared to trust, he can only excite our pity where he desires our admiration. Qui non dat quod amat, non accipit ille quod optat, was an inscription on an old chequer-board of the times of Henry II.  And what did Poe love?  Truth shrugs her shoulders, but forbears to answer,—­Himself.  His were the vagaries of genius without its large-hearted charities; its nice discrimination without its honesty of purpose; its startling originality without its harmonious proportions; its inevitable errors without its persevering energies.  He acknowledged no principle; he was actuated by no high aim; he even busied himself—­as so many of the unfortunate great have done—­with no chimera.  From a mind so highly cultured, an organization so finely strung, we expected the rarest blossoms, the divinest melodies.  The flowers lie before us, mere buds, from which the green calyx of immaturity has not yet curled, and in whose cold heart the perfume is not born; the melodies vibrate around us, matchless in mechanism, wondrous in miraculous accord, but as destitute of the soul of harmony as the score of Beethoven’s sonata in A flat to unlearned eyes.  If his analyses and criticisms are keen and graceful, they are unreliable and contradictory, for he was often influenced by private piques, and unpardonable egotism, and the opinions of those whose favor he courted.  He was Byron without Byron’s wonderful perceptions of nature, Byron’s consciousness of the good.

And is it from a genius like this that our literature has taken its tone?  Heaven forbid!  Wee Apollos there may be, ’the little Crichtons of the hour,’ who twist about their brows the cypress sprays that have fallen from this perverted poet’s wreath, and fancy themselves crowned with the laurel of a nation’s applause.  But these men are not types of our literature.  The truly great mind is never molded by the idol of a day, a clique, a sect.  Pure-hearted and strong the man must be whose hands take hold of the palaces of the world’s heart, who grasps the spirit of the coming time.  Errors may be forgiven, vices may be forgotten, where only a noble aim has influenced, as a true creative genius gleamed.

But larger constellations have appeared in our literary sky, that burn with undimmed lustre even beside that great morning star that rose above the horizon of the Middle Ages.  Historians we have, with all of Chaucer’s truthfulness and luxuriance of expression, and poets with his fresh tendernesses, his flashing thoughts, and exquisite simplicity of heart.  And perhaps, if we inquire for the distinguishing features of our literature, we shall discover them to be the strength and cheerfulness so pre-eminently the characteristics of Chaucer, which we have so long