come the summer-breath of Paestum
roses and the aroma of the rich red wine of Valdepenas; and there toasts
are given to the past and to the future, for genius knows no nation nor
any age. It sparkles along the current of history, and under its warm
smile deserts blossom like the rose.

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 m