owest possible ebb. Willis was
considered a genius, that is the worst that could possibly be said.
In the North a new race of great philosophers was growing up, but
Poe had neither their friendship nor encouragement. He went indeed,
sometimes, to the chilly _salon_ of Margaret Fuller, but he was
always a discord there. He was a mere artist and he had no business
with philosophy, he had no theories as to the "higher life" and the
"true happiness." He had only his unshapen dreams that battled with
him in dark places, the unborn that struggled in his brain for
birth. What time has an artist to learn the multiplication table or
to talk philosophy? He was not afraid of them. He laughed at Willis,
and flung Longfellow's lie in his teeth, the lie the rest of the
world was twenty years in finding. He scorned the obtrusive learning
of the transcendentalists and he disliked their hard talkative
women. He left them and went back to his dream women, his
_Berenice_, his _Ligeia_, his _Marchesa Aphrodite_, pale and cold as
the mist maidens of the North, sad as the Norns who weep for human
woe.

The tragedy of Poe's life was not alcohol, but hunger. He died when
he was forty, when his work was just beginning. Thackeray had not
touched his great novels at forty, George Eliot was almost unknown
at that age. Hugo, Goethe, Hawthorne, Lowell and Dumas all did their
great work after they were forty years old. Poe never did his great
work. He could not endure the hunger. This year the Drexel Institute
has put over sixty thousand dollars into a new edition of Poe's
poems and stories. He himself never got six thousand for them
altogether. If one of the great and learned institutions of the land
had invested one tenth of that amount in the living author forty
years ago we should have had from him such works as would have made
the name of this nation great. But he sold "The Masque of the Red
Death" for a few dollars, and now the Drexel Institute pays a
publisher thousands to publish it beautifully. It is enough to make
Satan laugh until his ribs ache, and all the little devils laugh and
heap on fresh coals. I don't wonder they hate humanity. It's so
dense, so hopelessly stupid.

Only a few weeks before Poe's death he said he had never had time or
opportunity to make a serious effort. All his tales were merely
experiments, thrown off when his day's work as a journalist was
over, when he should have been asleep. All those voyages into the
myst