nd his attempts at
the facetious were mostly failures.

Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon
the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his
country. His poems and tales might have been written _in vacuo_ for
any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame
has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been
favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the _Fleurs du Mal_,
translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy
poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in
character, a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If
he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of
Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either.

"If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky!"

{534}

Though Poe was a southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and
breeding, there was nothing distinctly southern about his peculiar
genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with
Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The
conditions which had made the southern colonies unfruitful in literary
and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to
the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin
in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery,
making it profitable to cultivate the new staple by enormous gangs of
field hands working under the whip of the overseer in large
plantations. Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the
States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a
comparatively mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its
peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the
North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into
politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and
excitement of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration sought the
free States, and there was no middle class at the South. The "poor
whites" were ignorant and degraded. There were people of education in
the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great
educated class from which a literature could proceed. And the culture
of the Sou