suggests a line of verse to a fairly assiduous reader of British poetry, and the names of fifteen memorable poets. Poe's Welby, Mowatt, Hoyt, Bogart and the rest are no more exquisitely provincial than Johnson's Stepney, Duke, Yalden, Mallett and the others. The two lists, seen in the light not of a theory but of known historic facts, show that the preservation of nonentities in the immortal fluid of a great man's reputation is not a matter of provincialism but of “diurnalism”; they are equal commentaries on the life of unprosperous genius which has to turn its attention to obscure or insignificant persons, in obedience to popular demand. Johnson's booksellers make selections from two centuries of British poetry, for publication in dignified bound volumes. Poe pretends to be writing for a local magazine mostly about contemporaneous persons, late books of prose and verse. It is somewhat beside the point, but nevertheless worth saying, that the great Doctor Johnson does not know a poem when he sees one, that it is he who recommends to the booksellers the inclusion of Yalden, Pomfret, Blackmore and Watts; Poe's perception is instantaneous, and even when he is discoursing of a poetaster as dead and buried, as are most of Johnson's "poets," he says something fine and searching about the art of verse. However, the point is not to contrast Johnson's dense surdity with Poe's almost invariable sensitiveness, but to see Poe against his historical background and remember that he did not choose the "literati" to represent his idea of the best in literature.

Poe's last work is "Eureka," a book that few have curiosity to read, and still fewer understand. It is a prose poem of

great beauty, doubly interesting because it is not in the misty mood that one would expect of a poet, but is a piece of modern rationalism. Poe saw the stars calmly and saw them cold and mathematical in their habits. He was so impressed with the finality of his vision and his triumphant solution of the cosmos that he chose a title since rendered trite by commercial inventors. Like all other philosophers he failed to find the whole truth, and few responded to his cry of discovery, but he did something that should be better known in the history of nineteenth-century thought. He saw the universe as a material process; he, the dreamer of dreams, x poetizes a scientific conception of the world without a trace of oriental superstition. Most other quasi-philosophic poetry of his time is allied with German idealism and Christian mysticism. Poe was the single voice of protest against transcendental cosmology. He was not in possession of all the available scientific knowledge of his day, but he was in accord with the spirit of scientific materialism. In this and in other respects he was akin to Shelley. These poets are better thinkers than prosaic thinkers are ready to acknowledge. Israfel, plucking his lyre in the sky, understands that the stars and all the songs that praise them are physical phenomena.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Edgar (Allan) Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. He died in Baltimore, October 7, 1849. His parents were actors. In 1811 he was adopted by John Allan. In 1815 he was taken to England and sent to Manor House School,

near London. In 1826 he went to the University of Virginia, which he left because his foster father did not approve his conduct. In 1827 he enlisted in the United States Army. He was honourably discharged in 1829. In 1830 he entered West Point. The next year he was dismissed. The course of his life from 1831 to 1833 is obscure. In 1833 he received a prize of one hundred dollars for "A Ms. Found in a Bottle." In 1835 he was assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1836 he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm. The next year he settled in Philadelphia. In 1839 he was associate editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. In 1841 he became editor of Graham's Magazine. In 1844 he moved to New York City and became assistant editor of the Evening Mirror. The next year he was manager of the Broadway Journal. Virginia Clemm Poe died in 1847. The last months of his life he spent in Richmond.

His works are: Tamerlane and Other Poems, 1827; Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 1829; Poems, 1831; Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838; The Conchologist's First Book, 1839; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840; The Raven and Other Poems, 1845; Tales, 1845; Eureka: A Prose Poem, 1848; The Literati (in Godey's Lady's Book, 1846), 1850; Collected Works, 1850.

The best biography of Poe is that by George E. Woodberry in two volumes, published in 1909, an amplification of his "Life" in American Men of Letters. Only a reader who has laboured through many volumes of Poe biography can realize how sane and discriminative is Mr. Woodberry's early study. His extended work is final and wholly satis

factory. "The Life and Letters of Poe," by James A. Harrison, contains much interesting matter, but it is floridly sentimental and ornate. Excellent essays are those by Emile Hennequin in "Ecrivains Francisés," and Mr. John M. Robertson in "Essays Toward a Critical Method." The introductory essay to Putnam's edition of Poe by Professor Charles F. Richardson is very good, as is also the essay by Andrew Lang in the edition of Poe's Poems published in London by Kegan, Paul Trench & Co. in 1883. French essays about Poe are numerous, many of them interesting and suggestive.

CHAPTER IX

HOLMES

AMERICAN literature is less strong in the mood of passionate contemplation the serenest mood of art than in the mood of revolt, exhortation, divine discontent with some aspects of the world. The more powerful writers, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Whittier, Mark Twain, are in opposition to things as they are; they are men of radical convictions, which they try to impress on the reader through satire, sermons, inspired journalism, intense occasional verse. I do not mean that the spirit of propaganda, aggressive belief, is their only driving impulse, but the fire of the reformer is in them all; they are, each in his way, glorious cranks, and they are the most virile personalities in our literature.

Holmes's views have been familiar for fifty years, and he now seems on the whole a witty, finely bred old gentleman, expressing over the teacups ideas that are mild and respectable, certainly not dynamitical. It is to-day a little dif

ficult to realize that he, too, was a revolter, that the first numbers of the Atlantic Monthly, made precious by "The Autocrat," encountered opposition among some of the conventional religious barbarians who were a dull majority in our free and independent country. Holmes is the unsuperstitious man of the world, the rationalist, the spokesman of what in