ad to beg for bread at the hands of his
publishers and critics could be nothing but a liar, and had he not
had the insane egotism and conviction of genius, he would have
broken down and written the drivelling trash that his countrymen
delighted to read. Poe lied to his publishers sometimes, there is no
doubt of that, but there were two to whom he was never false, his
wife and his muse. He drank sometimes too, when for very ugly and
relentless reasons he could not eat. And then he forgot what he
suffered. For Bacchus is the kindest of the gods after all. When
Aphrodite has fooled us and left us and Athene has betrayed us in
battle, then poor tipsy Bacchus, who covers his head with vine
leaves where the curls are getting thin, holds out his cup to us and
says, "forget." It's poor consolation, but he means it well.

The Transcendentalists were good conversationalists, that in fact
was their principal accomplishment. They used to talk a great deal
of genius, that rare and capricious spirit that visits earth so
seldom, that is wooed by so many, and won by so few. They had grand
theories that all men should be poets, that the visits of that rare
spirit should be made as frequent and universal as afternoon calls.
O, they had plans to make a whole generation of little geniuses. But
she only laughed her scornful laughter, that deathless lady of the
immortals, up in her echoing chambers that are floored with dawn and
roofed with the spangled stars. And she snatched from them the only
man of their nation she had ever deigned to love, whose lips she had
touched with music and whose soul with song. In his youth she had
shown him the secrets of her beauty and his manhood had been one
pursuit of her, blind to all else, like Anchises, who on the night
that he knew the love of Venus, was struck sightless, that he might
never behold the face of a mortal woman. For Our Lady of Genius has
no care for the prayers and groans of mortals, nor for their
hecatombs sweet of savor. Many a time of old she has foiled the
plans of seers and none may entreat her or take her by force. She
favors no one nation or clime. She takes one from the millions, and
when she gives herself unto a man it is without his will or that of
his fellows, and he pays for it, dear heaven, he pays!

"The sun comes forth and many reptiles spawn,
He sets and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered unto death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awake again."

Yes