e head-stones of an old
grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric magazines and in the
book notices and reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one
encounters the handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow,
Hawthorne, and Lowell, embodied in this mass of forgotten literature.
It would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the time, to
predict that these and a few others would soon be thrown out into bold
relief, as the significant and permanent names in the literature of
their generation, while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and
scores of others who figured beside them in the fashionable
periodicals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, would
sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter
were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public
sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance."
The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily
ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is
constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry
on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be
predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it
sees the light, that it is destined to endure. But tastes and fashions
change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary
critic with humility than to read {526} the prophecies in old reviews
and see how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them
the lie.

From among the professional _litterateurs_ of his day emerges, with
ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849.) By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his
first volume, _Tamerlane and Other Poems_, 1827, was printed in that
city and bore upon its title page the words, "By a Bostonian." But his
parentage, so far as it was any thing, was southern. His father was a
Marylander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself
the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an orphan by
the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a
wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an English
school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia and
afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was
wild and irregular: he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter and
perverse; f