whose sounds would suit his purpose-effects are wrested such as had never been wrested before. "The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crispèd and sere,— It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid-region of Weir,— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." This is haunting music, though here again, as in the tales, if we seek to know precisely how the effect is secured, we are baffled. The ordinary devices of alliteration, refrains, and repetends, are freely used, but no mere resort to those devices can parallel the effect. The truth is, the verse is not only haunting, but haunted. In it is the strange, unearthly imagery, and over it is the spectral light, that only Poe's imagination could create. To a beauty of language, by its very nature as indescribable as music, is added a weird enchantment of scene that vanishes before any attempt to reclothe it in other words. Analysis and criticism are helpless before this final achievement of Poe's art-the creation of that "supernal loveliness" which, he declared, it is the struggle of all fit souls to apprehend. Beyond this we may scarcely go. There are dark hints of other things in Poe's poetry. The Raven of his dreams is, in the words of Mr. Stedman, "an emblem of the Irreparable, the guardian of pitiless memories." The Haunted Palace and the Conqueror Worm have a direct and almost frightful allegorical significance. And what music may not come from the lute of Israfel, what hopes are not barred by the legended tomb of Ulalume? But we gain little from the study of these things, indeed we almost resent any covert significance. For of Poe's poetry, as of his highest prose, it must be said that it . makes almost no moral appeal. Nothing is conceived on a moral plane. He has nothing to teach us-no mission, no message. But the sounds and the visions remain, the poet's mastery over the secrets of the terrible, the mysterious, the sublime, and the beautiful; and we may well rest content to listen without questions to the wild measures of Israfel's lute, to gaze awe-stricken upon the city in the sea, or to pass speechless by the dim lake of Auber and through the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. Poe's Position in Literature. By all that has been said, Poe's romantic temper is made plain. It does not betray itself in any dominant love for nature, nor in any tender sentimentalizing, but rather in a passion for the antique, the highly adorned, the odd, the gloomy, the marvellous, in a word, for that "strangeness in beauty" which Mr. Pater, borrowing a phrase from Bacon, has declared to be the distinctive romantic note. Poe was passionately fond of mystery, and he was drawn irresistibly to the supreme mysteries of life and death. In so far as his work is morbidly psychological, it allies him with Charles Brockden Brown, and through him with the metaphysical school of Godwin, though Poe's imagination was of a higher order. If we must name any prototype, it would be Coleridge. But Poe was Poe. We may account for Longfellow, for Hawthorne, for Emerson; but the individual note, the "inexpressible monad" which evolutionary science itself as yet fails to account for, was peculiarly strong in Poe, and we must leave him underived. Abroad he has long been considered as a creative writer of the first rank. It is to the shame of Americans that they have seldom been able to take quite his full measure; but our best critics have been instinctively attracted to him, and it is worthy of note that his works have lately been honored with a scholarly and fairly definitive critical edition-an honor which, not to consider statesmen, like Franklin, or the early historians or theologians, has fallen to no other American man of letters. FROM SOUTH TO NORTH Our review of the minor fiction that was produced contemperaneously with the earliest and, in general, the best work of Cooper closed with the record of one writer of the region south of New York-John Pendleton Kennedy, of Baltimore. Accompanying and following Kennedy, whose activity in fiction was not long continued, were several writers who availed themselves, like him, of the romantic possibilities of their environment, and so became, in their modest way, more distinctively romancers of the South than Poe, whose genius was really of no land or clime. One of these was a certain Dr. Bird, of Del Robert Mont aware and Philadelphia, an early explorer of the gomery Bird, Mammoth Cave, and an industrious writer of 1803-1854. tragedies and tales. Two romances of MexicoCalavar (1834) and The Infidel (1835)—received high praise from Prescott; and the once famous Kentucky romance, Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay (1837), had the merit of portraying the North American savages without any of Cooper's idealization. William Gil The writer of the South, however, who was most genuinely moved by its romantic scenes and legends, and who succeeded in doing for colonial and border life there a service more Simms, similar to that Cooper did for the North, was Wil1806-1870. liam Gilmore Simms, of Charleston, South Carolina. Simms began his career as a lawyer, but soon adopted the profession of journalism and literature. To the end he remained a professional author, writing both poetry and prose with great facility-romance, drama, history, and criticism. His published works number over sixty titles. Perhaps the best of his romances is The Yemassee, published in 1835, a tale of the war in 1715 between the early Carolina settlers and the Indians. Others are Guy Rivers (1834), a tale of Georgia; The Partisan (1835), a tale of Marion's men; Mellichampe (1836), another tale of the Revolution; and Beauchampe (1842), a tale of Kentucky. Hastily written, his stories are naturally deficient in the higher qualities of construction and style, but they have plenty of vigor and imaginative color, and their vogue is still great enough to warrant their publication in fairly complete editions. William Starbuck Mayo, 1812-1895. Herman Melville, 18191891. To New York belonged several writers of tales of adventure whose scenes were laid on shipboard or in remote quarters of the earth. One of these was Dr. Mayo, the author of Kaloolah (1849), an extravagant story of Yankee exploration in the wilds of Africa. Another, and more important, was Herman Melville, who in his youth embarked upon a whaling vessel bound for the Pacific and spent several years, a portion of the time in captivity, among the South Sea Islands. The series of partly fanciful tales founded upon his experiences-Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Moby Dick, or the White Whale (1851), etc.,had a wide circulation, and an occasional admirer can still be found who will pronounce them superior to Cooper's. They differ from Cooper's tales of the sea in that they portray, not the life of the merchant or the naval officer, but the life of the common sailor who ships "before the mast." Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 1815-1882. Superior, however, to all these tales in quality, and scarcely inferior in romantic interest, is the wholly truthful narrative of Two Years Before the Mast. It was written by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., son of the author of The Buccaneers, and was published in 1840. Obliged by some weakness of the eyes to suspend his course of studies at Harvard, Dana went to sea in the American merchant service, and of the faithful record of his experiences in the journey around Cape Horn and trading up and down the coast of California he made a book that in its fascination for youth ful readers is a rival not only of Cooper's stories but almost of Robinson Crusoe itself. William Ware, 1797-1852. Few romances of the extravagant type came out of New England. Even Dana's narrative-for Dana was a New Englander had the warrant of truth. For the justification of fiction the warrant of a moral purpose might serve, but pure physical adventure for the mere entertainment of it was little likely to be tolerated. And so, as we search among the minor romancers of New England, we find only such writers as William Ware and Sylvester Judd, both Unitarian ministers, and both writers who enlisted romance Sylvester Judd, in the cause of religion. Ware's books-Zenobia 1813-1853. (first printed as Letters from Palmyra, 1837), Aurelian (first printed as Probus, 1838), and Julian (1841)—portray, with considerable learning and imagination, the conflict of Christianity and paganism in the days of the decline of Rome. It is the type of romance since made familiar to us by the greater work of the English Kingsley and the German Ebers. Judd's one book of importance was Margaret, a Tale of the Real and the Ideal (1845), a story at once more realistic and more fantastic than Ware's stories. In spite of its crudeness and prolixity, it long held a respectable place on New England bookshelves, both for its vigorous portraiture of Maine life and scenery and for the rare spirituality which it throws about its central character. Lowell's rather extravagant praise of it, in his Fable for Critics, as "the first Yankee book With the soul of Down East in't, and things farther East," doubtless prolonged its life. About all we care to preserve of it is a certain description of a snowstorm which has often been reprinted and which may well be read for its own sake. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1804-1864 From writers like those just described it is not difficult to make the transition to the most spiritual of American roman |