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"And all with pearl and ruby glowing

Was the fair palace door,

Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,

And sparkling evermore,

A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty

Was but to sing,

In voices of surpassing beauty,

The wit and wisdom of their king.

V

"But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate !)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.

VI

"And travellers now within that valley

Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a ghastly rapid river,

Through the pale door

A hideous throng rush out forever,

And laugh- but smile no more."

Here we chance to have side by side his prose and his verse. It is hardly excessive to say that as you read both over and over again, particularly if you read aloud, you will feel more and more that almost every vowel, every consonant, and more surely still every turn of rhythm which places the accent so definitely where the writer means it to fall, indicates not only a rare sense of form, but unusual technical mastery.

They indicate more than this, too. Whether the things which Poe wished to express were worth his pains is not the question. He knew what they were, and he unfeignedly wished to express them. He had almost in perfection a power more frequently shown by skilful melodramatic actors than by men of letters, the power of assuming an intensely unreal mood and of so setting it forth as to make us for the moment share it unresistingly. This power one feels perhaps most palpably in the peculiar melody of his verse. That "Haunted Palace" may be stagey as you like; but there is something in its lyric quality — that quality whereby poetry impalpably but unmistakably performs the office best performed by pure music which throws a reader into a mood almost too subtle for words. A morbid mood, to be sure, this of Poe's, and perhaps a meretricious; plenty of things may be said against it; but the mood is distinct from any other into which ✔literature has taken us.

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A little while ago we reminded ourselves of a certain analogy between Poe's career and that of Marlowe, the Elizabethan tragic dramatist, who came to his end just as

Shakspere's serious work was beginning. Between Poe's work and Marlowe's there is another analogy which has historically proved more characteristic of literature in America than in England. Marlowe's life, like Poe's, was ugly, sinful, and sordid; yet hardly a line of Marlowe's tragedies is morally corrupt. For this, indeed, there was good reason. Marlowe chanced to belong to the period when English literature was first springing into conscious life, with all the force of unhampered imaginative vitality. In literature, as in human existence, a chief grace of normal youth is freedom from such baseness as time must make familiar to maturity. In the case of Poe a similar contrast between life and work appears. Here, however, this normal reason for it did not exist. The very fact that Poe's work has been eagerly welcomed by continental Europe is evidence enough, if one needed evidence, that his temper was such as the cant of the present day calls decadent. Now the decadent literature which has prevailed in recent England, and far more that which has prevailed elsewhere in Europe, is pruriently foul, obscenely alive with nameless figures and incidents, and with germ-like suggestions of such decay as must permeate a civilisation past its prime. In Poe's work, on the other hand, for all the decadent quality of his temper, there is a singular cleanness, something which for all the thousand errors of his personal life seems like the instinctive purity of a child. He is not only free from any taint of indecency; he seems remote from fleshliness of mental habit.

In the strenuousness of his artistic conscience we found a trait more characteristic of America than of England,—a trait which is perhaps involved in the national self-consciousness of our country. In this instinctive freedom from lubricity, so strongly in contrast with the circumstances of his personal career, and yet to all appearances so unaffected, one feels a touch still more characteristic of his America. It is allied, perhaps, with that freedom from actuality which we have

seen to characterise his most apparently vivid work. The world which bred Poe was still a world to whose national life we may give the name of inexperience.

Intensely individual, then, and paradoxically sincere in all his histrionic malady of temper, Poe set forth a peculiar range of mysterious though not significant emotion. In the fact that this emotion, even though insignificant, was mysterious, is a trait which we begin to recognise as characteristically American, at least at that moment when American life meant something else than profound human experience. There is something characteristically American, too, in the fact that Poe's work gains its effect from artistic conscience, an ever present sense of form. Finally, there is something characteristically American in Poe's freedom from either conventional or real fleshly taint. Though Poe's power was great, however, his chief merits prove merits of refinement. Even through a time so recent as his, refinement of temper, conscientious sense of form, and instinctive neglect of actual fact remained the most characteristic traits, if not of American life, at least of American letters.

VI

THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL

In the course of our glances at Poe we had occasion to recognise the existence of an extensive, though now forgotten, periodical literature," Godey's Lady's Books," "Southern Literary Messengers," "Graham's Magazines," and the like, which carried on the impulse toward periodical publication already evident in the time of Brockden Brown. Throughout the older regions of America such things sprung up, flourished for a little while, and withered, in weed-like profusion. A year or two ago, Dr. W. B. Cairns, of the University of Wisconsin, published an admirable pamphlet, “On the Development of American Literature from 1815 to 1833," in which this ephemeral phase of it is thoroughly set forth. So far as the periodicals were literary, they were intensely conventional and sentimental, often in the manner of which Mrs. Rowson's once popular novel, "Charlotte Temple," may be taken as a comically extravagant example. In brief, as Dr. Cairns displays them, they are another proof, if proof were needed, of what inevitable luxuriance of insignificant waste must accompany any period of artistic achievement, even when the achievement itself is so far from amazing as was that of America during the years now in question.

In 1833, the year when Dr. Cairns brings his study to a close, there was founded in New York the magazine in which this phase of literary activity may be said to have culminated. This "Knickerbocker Magazine," then, deserves more attention than its positive merit would warrant. It was founded the year after Bryant brought out the first consider

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