ctually 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,