t wonderful of all in the
sensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluctuations of
sentiment.

We may, then, briefly summarise that Poe's first claim to commemoration
is that he was the pioneer in restoring to the art of poetry a faculty
which it had almost lost in its attempt to compete with science and
philosophy. It had become the aim of the poets to state facts; it was
given to Poe to perceive that no less splendid a future lay before those
who only hinted feelings. He was the earliest modern poet who
substituted the symbol for the exact description of an object or an
event. That "expression directe," about which the French have been
debating for the last quarter of a century, and over which M. Adolphe
Rette and M. Albert Mockel periodically dispute like Fathers of the
Church, was perceived and was deliberately repudiated by Poe eighty
years ago. He was deeply impregnated with the sense that the harmony of
imagination is not destroyed, but developed, by drawing over a subject
veil after veil of suggestion. His native temperament aided him in his
research after the symbol. He was naturally a cultivator of terror, one
who loved to people the world with strange and indefinable powers. His
dreams were innocent and agitating, occupied with supernatural terrors,
weighed upon by the imminence of shadowy presentments. He trembled at he
knew not what; in this he was related to the earliest poets of the
world, and in his perpetual recurrence to symbol he recalls the action
of their alarms.

The cardinal importance, then, of Poe as a poet is that he restored to
poetry a primitive faculty of which civilisation seemed successfully to
have deprived her. He rejected the doctrinal expression of positive
things, and he insisted upon mystery and symbol. He endeavoured to
clothe unfathomable thoughts and shadowy images in melody that was like
the wind wandering over the strings of an aeolian harp. In other words,
he was the pioneer of a school which has spread its influence to the
confines of the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature.
He was the discoverer and the founder of Symbolism.

1909.

[Footnote 6: A shocking false quantity; but how little that would matter
to Poe]

THE AUTHOR OF "PELHAM"

One hundred and twenty years have nearly passed since the birth of
Bulwer-Lytton, and he continues to be suspended in a dim and ambiguous
position in the history of our literature. He combined extraord