control of a system of
discipline so unsuited to his temperament; that, so far from being
intemperate, a single glass of wine sufficed to bring on something like
insanity; that, instead of neglecting his family, he devoted himself to
them with a very rare exclusiveness, and wore down his health by watching
at the bedside of his sick wife; that he was as faithful to his business as
to his domestic obligations; and that, wholly disqualified for battling
with the world, he managed to keep his necessarily troubled life at least
unstained. We know, moreover, that he did not appoint Griswold his
literary executor, and that the document used by the latter as a means of
deriving from that assumed office an opportunity of vindictive defamation
was drawn up after the poet's death by Griswold himself. To the controversy
thus excited we are indebted for the illumination of one or two poems
relinquished by the critics as hopelessly, if not intentionally, obscure.
_Ulalume_, for example, held by some to be a mere experiment on the
jingling capacity of words and the taste of readers for grappling with
insoluble puzzles, is pronounced by one familiar with his most intimate
feelings at the time of its composition a sublimated but distinct reflex of
them and of the circumstances which gave them color.

Could Poe's pen have cleared itself from the morbid influences which fixed
it in a peculiar path, we might have missed some of his finest and most
subtle poems and some prose efforts which we could better spare. But his
wonderful powers of analysis would have been serviceable upon a broader and
more practical field. He had an insight into the laws of language and of
rhythm equalled by no one else in our day. What is most mysterious in the
forms and relations of matter had a special charm for him. None could trace
it more acutely; and his powers, matured by more and healthier years and
applied in their favorite direction, were quite equal to results like those
attained by his predecessor Goethe, the savant of poets. He died a few
years older than Burns and Byron, but more of a boy than either. The man
Poe we never saw. The best of him was to come, and it never came. Poe had,
however, what he is not always credited with--the sincerity and earnestness
of maturity. He was anything but a mere propounder of riddles. Had he lived
to our day, his office would have been to aid science, so wonderfully
advanced in the intervening third of a century, in