ry palate. He had made
Literature his intellectual mistress, and from the day he had declared
his allegiance to her he had served her faithfully--passionately--and he
could brook no flagging service in others.

Both his growing power of analysis and his highly developed artistic
feeling were brought into full play in this review work. Under his
guidance the writings of his contemporaries, whether they were the
little authors or the giants such as, in England, Tennyson (who was a
prime favorite with him), Macauley, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett, or in
America, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Irving, Emerson, stood forth
illumined--the weak spots laid bare, the strong points gleaming bright.

He unfalteringly declared his admiration of Hawthorne (then almost
unknown) in which the future so fully justified him. The tales of
Hawthorne, he declared, belonged to "the highest region of Art--an Art
subservient to genius of a very lofty order."

Even the work of the little authors was indebted to him for many a good
word, but the little authors hated him and returned the brilliant
sallies his pungent pen directed toward their writings with vollies of
mud aimed at his private character.

No matter what his subject, however, Edgar Poe always wrote with
power--with intensity. He seemed by turns to dip his pen into fire, into
gall, into vitriol--at times into his own heart's blood.

Of the last named type was the story "Eleonora," which appeared, not in
_Graham's_, but in _The Gift_ for the new year, and wherein was set
forth in phrases like strung jewels the story of the "Valley of the
Many-Colored Grass." The whole fabric of this loveliest of his
conceptions is like a web wrought in some fairy loom of bright strands
of silk of every hue, and studded with fairest gems. In it is no hint of
the gruesome, or the sombre--even though the Angel of Death is there. It
is all pure beauty--a perfect flower from the fruitful tree of his
genius at the height of its power.

All of Edgar Poe's work gains much by being read aloud, for the eye
alone cannot fully grasp the music that is in his prose as well as his
verse. "Eleonora" was read aloud in every city and hamlet of the United
States, and at firesides far from the beaten paths--the traveled
roads--that led to the cities; for it was written when every word from
the pen of Edgar Poe was looked for, waited for, with eager impatience,
and when _Graham's Magazine_ had been made in one little y