antic bards. The rigidness of self-criticism
which led Tennyson to ignore and annihilate, so far as in him lay,
full one half of his earlier productions, would hardly be understood
by them. This is particularly unlucky in the case of Poe, whose rhymes
sometimes run fairly away with him, till no purpose or meaning is
traceable amid a jingle of uncommon and fine-sounding words....

"Though Poe was a Southerner, his poetry has nothing in it suggestive
of his peculiar locality. It is somewhat remarkable that the
slave-holding, which has tried almost all other means of excusing or
justifying itself before the world, did not think of 'keeping a poet,'
and engaging the destitute author from its own territory to sing the
praises of 'the patriarchal institution.' And it would have been
a fair provocation that the Abolitionists had their poet already.
Indeed several of the northern poets have touched upon this subject;
Longfellow, in particular, has published a series of spirited
and touching anti-slavery poems; but the man who has made it his
_specialite_ is JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, a Quaker, literary editor of
the _National Era_, an Abolition and ultra-Radical paper, which, in
manful despite of Judge Lynch, is published at Washington, between the
slave-pens and the capitol. His verses are certainly obnoxious to the
jurisdiction of that notorious popular potentate, being unquestionably
'inflammatory, incendiary, and insurrectionary,' as the Southern
formula goes, in a very high degree. He makes passionate appeals to
the Puritan spirit of New England, and calls on her sons to utter
their voice,

... From all her wild green mountains,
From valleys where her slumbering fathers lie,
From her blue rivers and her welling fountains,
And clear cold sky--
From her rough coast, and isles, which hungry Ocean
Gnaws with his surges--from the fisher's skiff,
With white sails swaying to the billow's motion
Round rock and cliff--
From the free fireside of her unbought farmer,
From her free laborer at his loom and wheel.
From the brown smithy where, beneath the hammer,
Rings the red steel--
From each and all, if God hath not forsaken
Our land and left us to an evil choice;--

"and protest against the shocking anomaly of slavery in a free
country. At times, when deploring the death of some fellow laborer in
the cause, he falls into a somewhat subdued strain, though even then
there is m