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form, holding little Pearl by the hand.

The minister

felt for the child's other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain. (From The Scarlet Letter.)

Hawthorne's complete works are published in Boston and New York in several editions: 'Little Classic,' 25 vols. ; 'Riverside,' 15 vols. ; Standard Library,' 15 vols. The second and third of these editions contain the biography, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife, by his son Julian. Other biographies are Henry James's in 'English Men of Letters' (1880); George Parsons Lathrop's Study of Hawthorne (1876); a Life by M. D. Conway, in 'Great Writers' series (1890); Memories of Hawthorne, by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1897); and, best of all for critical analysis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, by George E. Woodberry in American Men of Letters' (1902).

JOHN WHITE CHADWICK.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), President of the United States at the crisis of his country's fortunes, rose nobly to the occasion. His other services to the Republic need no comment in this place; but though he was as far as possible removed from what usually constitutes the man of letters, he has earned to all time a place in the literature of his country by his letters, his State papers, his speeches, and especially by his two inaugural addresses and the address, quoted below, at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery in November 1863.

The Gettysburg Address.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

William Wetmore Story (1819-95), son of an eminent judge, publicist, and law professor, was born at Salem, Massachusetts, and trained for the Bar, but went to Italy (1848) and became a

sculptor; and his writings rank him amongst the American litterateurs of the period-several collections of poems, Roba di Roma (1862), The Tragedy of Nero (1875), The Castle of St Angelo (1877), He and She (1883), Fiammetta (1885), Conversations in a Studio, Excursions (1891), and A Poet's Portfolio (1894). He died at Vallombrosa.

Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), destined to be known to fame as 'Hans Breitmann,' was born of Quaker parentage in Philadelphia, graduated at Princeton, and continued his studies at Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris. He was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 1851, but turned to journalism; and residing chiefly in England and Italy from 1869 on, made a special study of the Gypsies, the fruits of which appeared between 1873 and 1891 in four important and much-discussed works. It was in 1871 that the famous Hans Breitmann Ballads, in the grotesque mixture of German and American-English known as Pennsylvania Dutch, first appeared; they were extraordinarily popular in America and Britain, and were constantly quoted, so that scraps of them are permanent parts of conversational English even now. A continuation in 1895, however, fell flat. Other works of Leland's, some of them results of serious research not unmingled with too confident speculation, are The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams (1855); Meister Karl's Sketch-Book (1855); Legends of Birds (1864); Egyptian SketchBook (1873); Fu-Sang, or the Chinese Discovery of America (1875); Algonquin Legends (1884); Etruscan-Roman Remains in Tradition (1892); a translation in prose and verse of Heine's works; a series of art manuals; Legends of Florence (1895); and Flaxius, or Leaves from the Life of an Immortal, a humorous melange of Italian folk-lore, ancient history, and prophecy; besides his own Memoirs (2 vols. 1893).

George William Curtis (1824-92), born in Providence, Rhode Island, had a short experience of Brook Farm, and after four years in Europe (1846-50), joined the staff of the New York Tribune, and was one of the editors of Putnam's Monthly from 1852 to 1869. He commenced the ‘Editor's Easy-Chair' papers in Harper's Monthly in 1853, and became principal leader-writer for Harper's Weekly on its establishment in 1857. His famous story of New York life, Trumps (1862), and most of his books appeared first in these journals. Prue and I (1856) was of sweet domesticity. His Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852) were bright-and light-impressions of his travels; Lotus-Eating (1852) was a series of letters from fashionable watering-places. More famous in their day were The Potiphar Papers (1853), satires on the pretentious life of New York. He was a strong anti-slavery orator and publicist, and a zealous writer in the cause of Civil Service reform. See Lives of him by Winter (1893), Chadwick (1893), and Cary (1894).

Edgar Allan Poe,

poet, romancer, and critic, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, 19th January 1809. His grandfather was General David Poe, a distinguished Maryland soldier of the Revolutionary War. His father and mother were actors of a travelling company which, spending three years in Boston, made possible the accident of his birth in a city which the grown man could not, as his dying mother bade him, love. The mother's talent and character were superior to the father's; poverty and ill-health they shared more evenly. The mother died in 1811; the father soon after, probably. Here for the boy was, apparently, singular good fortune. He was informally adopted by a Mr Allan of Richmond, Virginia, a tobacco merchant who had no children of his own. From 1815 to 1820 the Allans lived in England, and the boy, though injured by their indulgence, had good schooling at the Manor House School at Stoke Newington, and in Richmond from 1820 to 1826, when he entered the University of Virginia. The death in 1824 of a lady who had been particularly kind to him, and to whom he was devotedly attached, was the occasion of his first melancholy brooding upon death, the fixed idea of his life. At the university his habits were at once studious and convivial; he excelled in Latin; also in gambling -so much so that his guardian, refusing to pay his 'debts of honour,' took him home and set him at work in his counting-room. Thereupon he ran away to Boston, where, in 1827, he published Tamerlane and other Poems, a tiny book of forty pages in an edition of forty copies, as if prescient of the narrow chances of future bibliophiles. He concealed his name from his twoscore public and also from his publisher, as he had done a little earlier when enlisting in the United States army, where for two years he did himself no discredit. Mrs Allan dying in 1829, his quarrel with Mr Allan was superficially made up, and he was sent to the West Point Military Academy, on his way visiting Baltimore, and while there publishing Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. It contained five poems which, in addition to three in the Boston bibelot, grew at length into something lovely under his pruning hand. At West Point, where he entered 1st July 1830, he did well in mathematics and other studies, but was so recklessly neglectful of his military duties that he was expelled from the Academy in March 1831, 'the contriver of his own dishonour.' While he had been roistering the poetic fire had burned, and a parting subscription of the students enabled him to print, if not publish, a new volume of poems. It was not what the students expected-sparks from their burnt-out revelries-but his earlier poems in their first revision, with some new ones, among these the perfect 'Israfel.' This volume, like its two thinbodied heralds, was long since worth ten times its weight in gold to the collectors of rare books.

The next two years are vaguer for the biographer than Poe's poetical geography. Poe himself filled them with an imaginary journey to Russia. Probably they were spent in Baltimore with his aunt Mrs Clemm, the good angel of his life. In 1833 he entered gaily on that literary career which was to have so many sharp vicissitudes, so much more of disappointment than of encouragement and assured success. Answering an advertisement for a $100 prize story and poem, he won the former with his MS. found in a Bottle, and would have won the latter with his Coliseum could both prizes have been given to one person. The lucky story has now a place among the best of his stories of matter-of-fact impossible adventure, his lowest rank except the would-be humorous.

Meantime by forging Mr Allan's name he had hardened against himself that gentleman's heart ; had later forced his way in a drunken passion into Mrs Allan's chamber (Mr Allan had taken a second wife), and still later upon Mr Allan's dying hours, and was not so much as mentioned in his benefactor's will. Turning to thoughts of love for consolation, in September 1834 he took out a license of marriage with his cousin Virginia Clemm, a lovely child who had just turned thirteen. For some years his pet, she had come to worship him, and he now responded to her worship with an affection that was without any shadow of turning until her melancholy end. It is doubtful whether there was a formal marriage in 1834, seeing that a new license w 3 taken out in 1836 in Richmond, followed by a marriage ceremony. Poe had returned to Richmond in 1835, and there for a time his prospects as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger were bright. Two volumes of his collected works are filled with his two years' work on the Messenger, including some of his most memorable things. His industry must have been remarkable, and now, as always, he had an exacting conscience for his work, in singular contrast with the weakness of his tempted will. His employer was soon warning him of the danger of drinking before breakfast, so that the loss of his position in 1837 was not wholly mysterious. After a brief stay in New York, during which he published the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, another of his matter-of-fact impossibilities, he went to Philadelphia, a better literary market, and remained there six years, in the struggle for a living doing such doubtful hack-work as the Conchologist's First Book, while still the stream of his creative and critical talent flowed into every channel it could find. Making a good fight with his proclivity to drink, for some four years he lived a more temperate life than ever before or after in his adult years. Of various engagements that with Graham's Magazine was the most stable, and did for it what his connection with the Richmond Messenger had done for that-bringing it thousands of subscribers and wide popularity. It was mainly as a critic that he made his mark; less but in

creasingly as a writer of tales; hardly at all as a poet. His early poems, however, were apt to reappear in the tales and to furnish their points of departure, as 'The Haunted Palace' in his most perfect tale, The Fall of the House of Usher, and 'Ligeia' in the powerful but ghastly tale of the same name. Here was legitimate economy, but no one ever utilised his funeral baked meats' more openly. He warmed them over with sublime assurance that, however served, they made a tempting dish. The repetend, his favourite poetical device, was central to the manner of his literary and personal life, which had much that was highly significant and much ' damnable iteration.' In 1840 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, in two volumes, bound up a full sheaf of his tales, including many of the best but not any of the ratiocinative kind which The Golden Bug was soon to usher in. Meantime, proud and ambitious, he fretted in subordination to his inferiors and aspired to have a magazine of his own, the Penn or Stylus, neither of which ever came to birth. Could he have kept his besetting sin at bay, his success as a journalist, already enviable, would have become one of the proudest of his time; but this he could not do, especially after the beginning, with a broken blood-vessel, of his childwife's fatal illness in 1842. This filled him with a passionate despair. Though he was never an habitual drunkard, his periods of indulgence now became more frequent, each marked by wild excitement, followed by horrible lassitude and depression. The conflicting accounts of his character and behaviour mark the difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober. The latter was gracious, gentle, and refined; the former bitter, sour, contentious, the victim of degenerate will. To drink he added opium, which, if it sometimes touched his page to more ethereal fancy, exacted fearful penalties. Rumours of 'other vices' are without foundation. Even his most sensuous imagination was never sensual.

In 1844 he removed to New York, where his principal editorial connection was with the Broadway Journal, of which for a short and brilliant period he was the nominal owner. In 1845 he entered with The Raven on a second period of poetical production, after a fallow period of fifteen years' duration, except for the refashioning of his early crudities. The Raven did more for his reputation than all his reviews and tales. The Bells (1847) chimed in, and other poems followed, of less popular character, but of more inwardness and more exquisite beauty. From 1846 his health was utterly broken, and his poverty was made a subject of public notice and relief. Those who wonder at his chronic impecuniosity and inveterate borrowing should remember the miserable pay he got for his best work. The good aunt kept his home as neat as it was bare, the neatness a necessity of his personal refinement, as was the delicate hand in which he always wrote, as if never putting

pen to paper when fallen from his best estate. He always had a genius for attracting friends; too frequently disappointing them and wearing out their kindly disposition. In January 1847 the crowning misery befell, the death of poor little Virginia. He had then two years to live. These he so conducted that the most charitable, and probably the truest, explanation is that drink, opium, and sorrow had shaken sovereign reason from her seat. If the long-drawn futility of his pseudo-scientific Eureka does not require this construction, what does is his vain insistence on a first edition of fifty thousand copies and his claim for its worthless and yet powerful lucubrations of a revolutionary importance equal to Newton's theory of gravitation. From his sorrow for his lost Virginia he passed quickly to a series of sentimental consolations, looking here and there to marriage, and a union of sordid convenience had been negotiated in Richmond when a fatal lapse in Baltimore betrayed him into the hands of certain vile politicians who, drugging him for their base uses, induced a brain-fever of which he died, 7th October 1849. In the city of his first literary triumph he was followed to his grave by five persons, one of whom was the officiating clergyman.

His mournful death effected his entrance on a posthumous career which has been marked by stranger vicissitudes than those of his life. The details of that life have been contested in many particulars; its general character no less. A host of petty critics, with others of great competency, have endeavoured to assign his rank, with results ranging through wide degrees of difference. The principal line of cleavage is between those who value most his poems and those who value most his tales, but some have set the highest value on his critical writings. These made his widest reputation in their day, but they have little value now except for the literary historian. If they were not the best of their kind in America when written, they were near to that, while marred by envy, favouritism, and a distorting personal equation. He made himself the measure of things. What he could not do must not be done. Hence (pace Homer) a long poem could not be written, nor (pace Scott) a long story. Didacticism and plagiarism were the Paynim against whom he tilted with the grimmest joy of battle. Of the former he was wholly innocent; of the latter often guiltier than those whom he assailed, while in his bravery of recondite learning he was frequently the ingenious charlatan.

Passing from his criticism to his tales, we pass from transient reputation to enduring fame. Their style commends them all, while, bettering with time, it is, at its best, far below the level of Hawthorne's more flexible medium. They exhibit the tendency to narrowness of range and iteration, which mark all the products of his mind, far less than the poems. A sentiment of horror is their prevailing trait, engagement with death and ruin

running parallel thereto, the idea worked out with a concentration that subordinates every detail to the desired effect. In each kind there are various degrees, and the kinds have an ascension of their Own. The lowest is the humorous, in which Poe comes near to making us laugh at him rather than with him. Let Duc de Omelette witness as a forlorn example. Of biting irony he had enough. Higher up we have the psychology of intensive fear and horror in such things as Berenice, Ligeia, and the House of Usher. He is at his best when he comes nearest, as in the last of these, to working in Hawthorne's spirit. In his great conscience stories, with William Wilson at their

EDGAR ALLAN POE.

After a Photograph by Whitehurst.

head, his experience of the pains of conscience does not serve him so well as Hawthorne's impersonal imagination. He was more external than Hawthorne, more mechanical, but such a master of the curiously horrible as Hawthorne never was. On the other hand, he descended into details of physical horror from which Hawthorne's finer spirit spontaneously recoiled; and while Hawthorne's taste was inferior to his fancy and imagination, Poe's was so to a more pronounced degree. With a florid sensuousness of decoration, as in Landor's Cottage and The Domain of Arnheim, compared with which Hawthorne's scenes were gray and cold, there were lapses into prettiness of word and phrase which for Hawthorne were impossible, as if the fumes of that censer which Poe swung for a swarm of feeble poetasters had dulled his sense of their defects.

But, after all, it is as a poet that Poe enjoys

the highest fame, and that which has the promise of most permanence. The meagreness of his product and the narrowness of his range may challenge this opinion, but it is that to which the tendency of criticism is clear and strong. Hardly more than a dozen of his poems have survived the winnowing of time, and these, with two or three exceptions, are variations of a single theme, the death of a beautiful and beloved woman. Poe formally announced this subject as the highest subject of the poet's art, seeking, perhaps unconsciously, a justification of his contracted range. That he was more artist than poet is suggested by the carefulness with which, for lack of novel germs, he matured his early fruit. Reverent of his gift, he did not force his mood, however sorely he needed the money that his poorest verses would have brought. His work, then, was at once the product of a sacred spontaneity and an exigent elaboration. The poet gave the impulse and the artist gave the form. Israfel stands quite alone among his early poems as from the first so perfect as to require little change. The others in their first crudity gave meagre promise of their ultimate perfection. Even their musical quality, commonly thought inevitable, was carefully wrought out, and it now appears that Poe's ear was defective, and that his lines were made musical only by many revisions. That he was bent on making them so at all hazards is plain. He sacrificed sense to sound, secured by meaningless alliterations. There is little thought in his poems; but there is what he intended, a sentiment, an emotion, to which everything is subordinate-a sentiment of mystery, an emotion of infinite loss and horror and regret. The resurgence of his lyrical gift in 1845, after long silence, was one of the strangest incidents of his unhappy life. Five notable poems were its fruit: The Raven, The Bells, Ulalume, For Annie, Annabel Lee. They represent fuller if less exquisite moments than the early group. We are not to believe that The Raven was written in the wilful and mechanical fashion described in The Philosophy of Composi tion any more than in his actual 'descent into the maelstrom.' Inferior to Israfel and others, it stands alone in the quaint persistence of its pressure on the note of irremediable woe. The Bells has, perhaps naturally, a metallic ring which contrasts strangely with Ulalume, in which we seem to have the very step and moan of longdrawn misery. To Annie gives us the recurrent theme of life in death in its most poignant manner, while Annabel Lee, published almost simultaneously with his death, sounds his most human note, as if the fever called living' were 'over at last,' and he were entering on a saner and a sweeter life. But it is one more regret for the lost delight of peerless womanhood. It was Poe's belief that beauty was a soothing influence. But the beauty of his monodies disturbs and lacerates our minds. Their haunting melodies are not to be escaped; but they sound no note of health or joy. We

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admire the brilliant power, the skilful art, but we are never comforted and cheered. Fruits of a sombre genius and a sad experience, his works make their appeal especially to those who can hardly find symbols too melancholy for their mental gloom, and to those who are so overstocked with happiness that they like to play with misery and to consort with ghosts and ghouls.

To appreciate Poe's power and range as a romancer, one should read four of his best stories in four kinds : intensive horror, Fall of the House of Usher; outraged and retributive conscience, William Wilson; ingenious ratiocination, Murders in the Rue Morgue or Mystery of Marie Roget; pseudo-scientific adventure, The Descent into the Maelstrom. These cannot be effectively abridged; but nothing better renders the habitual spirit of his prose work than the 'Overture' called 'Silence,' quoted below. The Raven is Poe's bestknown poem, his masterpiece of intensive iteration, but its present use would be exclusive of all other specimens, and consequently it has seemed best to renounce it in order that a more general view may be obtained.

From 'Silence: a Fable.'

'Listen to me,' said the Demon, as he placed his hand upon my head. The region of which I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaïre. And there is no quiet there, nor silence. . . .

It was night, and the rain fell; and, falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall lilies, and the rain fell upon my head-and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation. And, all at once, the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in colour. And mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood by the shore of the river, and was lighted by the light of the moon. And the rock was gray, and ghastly, and tall,—and the rock was gray. Upon its front were characters engraven in the stone; and I walked through the morass of water-lilies, until I came close unto the shore, that I might read the characters upon the stone. But I could not decipher them. And I was going back into the morass, when the moon shone with a fuller red, and I turned and looked again upon the rock, and upon the characters ;-and the characters were DESOLATION. And I looked upwards, and there stood a man upon the summit of the rock; and I hid myself among the water-lilies that I might discover the actions of the man. And the man was tall and stately in form, and was wrapped up from his shoulders to his feet in the toga of old Rome. And the outlines of his figure were indistinct-but his features were the features of a deity; for the mantle of the night, and of the mist, and of the moon, and of the dew, had left uncovered the features of his face. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek, I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude. And the man sat upon the rock, and leaned his head upon his hand, and looked out upon the desolation. He looked down into the low unquiet shrubbery, and up into the tall primeval trees, and up higher at the rustling heaven, and into the crimson

moon. And I lay close within shelter of the lilies, and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude;-but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock. . . .

'Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of silence, the river, and the lilies, and the wind, and the forest, and the heaven, and the thunder, and the sighs of the water-lilies. And they became accursed, and were still. And the moon ceased to totter up its pathway to heaven-and the thunder died away-and the lightning did not flash-and the clouds hung motionless—and the waters sank to their level and remained-and the trees. ceased to rock-and the water-lilies sighed no moreand the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of sound throughout the vast illimitable desert. And I looked upon the characters of the rock, and they were changed ;-and the characters were SILENCE. And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man, and his countenance was wan with terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon the rock were SILENCE. And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste, so that I beheld him no more.'

To Helen.

[Written in Poe's boyhood to the beautiful friend whose death profoundly affected Poe's imagination.]

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicéan barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home. To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand, Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are holy-land!

Israfel.

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
'Whose heart-strings are a lute;'
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,

And the giddy stars (so legends tell) Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice all mute.

Tottering above

In her highest noon,
The enamoured moon
Blushes with love,

While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiades, even,
Which were seven),

Pauses in Heaven.

And they say (the starry choir

And the other listening things) That Israfeli's fire

Is owing to that lyre

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