find a complement in The Flood of Years, that majestic chant written in the poet's eighty-second year. Together the two poems make a perfect confession of faith, and mark both verges of a life and genius that for purity and consecration it would be hard to find excelled.

CHAPTER V

ROMANCE.-POE, HAWTHORNE

The dearth of American literature for nearly two hundred years was essentially a dearth of ro.nance. The cause may be traced in part to Puritanism. The Puritan temperament was not one to indulge visions save such as were born of religion or superstition, and the New England writers rarely turned to fictitious themes. The early chroniclers, for instance, were content to remain chroniclers; they showed no such tendency as John Smith of Virginia to infuse imagination into their narratives. In the non-Puritan South, indeed, had the South been studious of the literary art, romance might have appeared early. As it was, we have seen that the beginnings were made at Philadelphia by Charles Brockden Brown, though not until about 1800. Shortly after that, the romantic spirit, in a poetic guise, could be detected in the ephemeral work of such New York writers as Drake and the elder Dana, or in the poems of Mrs. Brooks, written largely in Cuba. With Irving and Cooper, both also of New York, the creative imagination was finally unfettered and American literature came into being. Little then remained but to refine upon the work of these two prolific writers, -to combine the art of the one with the inventive faculty of the other, and to make those further excursions into the regions of the supernatural or the spiritual that afford the final test of the romancer's power. This is virtually what was done by two writers of the second third of the century, Poe and Hawthorne-the greatest representatives of our literature on its purely creative side. And of these it may be noted that the one to come earliest to fame belonged

externally, by everything but the accident of birth, to the South.

EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1809-1849

It is a striking commentary upon the transitory and unreliable nature of human records that a man should be able to live, as Edgar Allan Poe did, for many years in the public eye, and in an age when everything seems to go on record, and yet leave the simplest facts of his biography surrounded with mystery. Poe's ancestry, the place and date of his birth, his character and manner of life, and the cause and manner of his death, have all been subjects of doubt and sometimes of violent dispute. This is due in some measure to the irregularity of his life, which made mystification on his part possible or even desirable, and in some measure to the prejudices of his critics. The main facts and dates seem to be now settled, but in the more delicate matter of character and habits we must still speak in qualified terms.

Youth.

Edgar Allan Poe was born, the second of three children, at Boston, January 19, 1809. His father was a Baltimorean, the son of a Revolutionary patriot, possibly of Irish descent. His mother was of English birth. Both were members of a theatrical company then playing at Boston. Nearly three years later, by the death of the mother, at Richmond, Virginia, the children were left orphans. Edgar was adopted by Mr. John Allan, a Scotchman who had made a fortune in Virginia in the tobacco trade. He was brought up in luxury, a much spoiled child-petted for his beauty and precocity, amusing himself with dogs and ponies at summer resorts, and declaiming on the table for Mr. Allan's guests while they drank their wine. In his seventh year he was taken to England and put into school in a London suburb, an experience which afterward furnished a setting for the story of William Wilson. Five years later he returned with his adoptive parents to Richmond. At the age of seventeen, a proud,

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reserved, half-melancholy and wholly self-willed youth, Le entered the University of Virginia. There he studied the ancient and modern languages and practiced athletics and the several gentlemanly" forms of dissipation. He was withdrawn by Mr. Allan for incurring gambling debts. From the tedious routine of Mr. Allan's counting-room he ran away to Boston, published there an anonymous little volume of forty pages the Byronic Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)-and enlisted in the army under an assumed name. * Poe afterward allowed the story to be circulated that during this period he had gone abroad to assist the Greeks in their struggle for liberty, like Byron, and that he had spent part of the time in St. Petersburg. Mr. Allan, discovering his whereabouts, secured his discharge from the army, and obtained his appointment, as a cadet, to West Point. A few months of the severe discipline of that school, however, sufficed for Poe's restless nature, and it is probable that he deliberately brought upon himself the dismissal which followed. He found himself adrift, at the age of twenty-two, with nothing further to expect from Mr. Allan.

Manhood.

Literature presented itself as his most natural vocation. Poe had, indeed, begun to take himself very seriously as a poet before he was twenty, and he had published a second volume at Baltimore while waiting for his cadetship. This volume contained, in addition to a revision of the ambitious Tamerlane and some minor poems, the mystical and scarcely intelligible Al Aaraaf. A second edition, issued at New York shortly after his expulsion from West Point, contained several new poems of real promise, like Israfel and To Helen. But poverty and the maturing of his powers conspired to turn his attention to prose, and his first success of note was made through that medium. In 1833 a Baltimore

* Woodberry's Poe, American Men of Letters Series.

weekly, The Saturday Visiter, offered a prize of one hundred dollars for the best prose tale submitted. Poe, then in desperate straits, submitted half a dozen. A MS. Found in a Bottle was awarded the first prize. John P. Kennedy, the novelist, who was one of the judges, took a kindly interest in the author, securing him some work in journalism, and probably providing even food and clothing. Poe was then living at Baltimore with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. Two years later he went to Richmond to assist in editing the Southern Literary Messenger, and about the same time married Virginia Clemm. She was a mere child, scarcely fourteen, but Poe, whose reverence for women was his noblest trait, loved and cared for her devotedly through all the vicissitudes of poverty and ill health that ensued, until her death eleven years later, a short time before his own. The inspiration of some of his finest creations—the child lovers of Eleonora, for instance—is to be found in this tender and ill-fated attachment.

It is a melancholy history to follow, a history of fierce struggle and final defeat. That Poe should be blamed for waging war upon society as he sometimes did, is not clear; on the principle of retaliation there was much to justify him. Yet we must feel that if he had only spent the little moral strength that was given him in waging war upon his own weaknesses, the end might have been happier. When fame did come to him, it was accompanied with envy and detraction, and he never had any measure of real prosperity. His wilful and erratic temperament, further perverted by his more or less frequent yielding to the temptations of liquor and opium, made any continued effort impossible. One career after another was opened to him only to be closed again; one enterprise after another was undertaken only to fail or be abandoned. The eighteen months at Richmond were followed by seven years at Philadelphia, where he edited successively The Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine. In the editorship