its present form. The irregular measure had a beauty as original as that of "Christabel;" and the lines had an ever-varying, ever-lyrical cadence of their own, until their author himself took them and cramped them into couplets. What a change from "Peccavimus! But rave not thus! And let the solemn song Go up to God so mournfully that she may feel no wrong!" to the amended version, portioned off in regular lengths, thus: "Peccavimus! but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song Or, worse yet, when he introduced that tedious jingle of slightly-varied repetition which in later years reached its climax in lines like these: "Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride, Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride." This trick, caught from Poe, still survives in our literature,-made more permanent, perhaps, by the success of his "Raven." This poem, which made him popular, seems to me far inferior to some of his earlier and slighter effusions; as those exquisite verses "To Helen," which are among our American classics, and have made "The glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome," a permanent phrase in our language. Poe's place in purely imaginative prose-writing is as unquestionable as Hawthorne's. He even succeeded, which Hawthorne did not, in penetrating the artistic indifference of the French mind; and it was a substantial triumph, when we consider that Baudelaire put himself or his friends to the trouble of translating even the prolonged platitudes of "Eureka" and the wearisome narrative of "Arthur Gordon Pym." Neither Poe nor Hawthorne has ever been fully recognized in England; and yet no Englishman of our time, not even De Quincey, has done any prose imaginative work to be named with theirs. But in comparing Poe with Hawthorne we see that the genius of the latter has hands and feet as well as wings, so that all his work is solid as masonry, while Poe's is broken and disfigured by all sorts of inequalities and imitations; he not disdaining, for want of true integrity, to disguise and falsify, to claim knowledge that he did not possess, to invent quotations and references, and even, as Griswold showed, to manipulate and exaggerate puffs of himself. . . . But, making all possible deductions, how wonderful remains the power of Poe's imaginative tales, and how immense is the ingenuity of his puzzles and disentanglements! The conundrums of Wilkie Collins never renew their interest after the answer is known; but Poe's can be read again and again. It is where spiritual depths are to be touched, that he shows his weakness; where he attempts it, as in "William Wilson," it seems exceptional; where there is the greatest display of philosophic form, he is often most trivial, whereas Hawthorne is often profoundest when he has disarmed you by his simplicity. The truth is, that Poe lavished on things comparatively superficial those great intellectual resources which Hawthorne reverently husbanded and used. That there is. something behind even genius to make or mar it,—this is the lesson of the two lives. Poe makes one of his heroes define another as "that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius." It is in the malice and fury of his own critical work that his low moral tone most betrays itself. No atmosphere can be more belittling than that of his "New York Literati:" it is a mass of vehement dogmatism and petty personalities, opinions warped by private feeling, and varying from page to page. He seemed to have absolutely no fixed standard of critical judgment, though it is true that there was very little anywhere in America during those acrimonious days, when the most honorable head might be covered with insult or neglect, while any young poetess who smiled sweetly on Poe or Griswold or Willis might find herself placed among the Muses. Poe complimented and rather patronized Hawthorne, but found him only "peculiar, and not original;" saying of him, "He has not half the material for the exclusiveness of literature that he has for its universality," whatever that may mean; and finally he tried to make it appear that Hawthorne had borrowed from himself. He returned again and again to the attack on Longfellow as a wilful plagiarist, denouncing the trivial resemblance between his "Midnight Mass for the Dying Year" and Tennyson's "Death of the Old Year" as "belonging to the barbarous class of literary piracy." To make this attack was, as he boasted, "to throttle the guilty;" and while dealing thus ferociously with Longfellow, thus condescendingly with Hawthorne, he was claiming a foremost rank among American authors for obscurities now forgotten, such as Mrs. Amelia B. Welby and Estelle Anne Lewis. No one ever did more than Poe to lower the tone of literary criticism in this country; and the greater his talent, the greater the mischief. As a poet he held for a time the place earlier occupied by Byron, and later by Swinburne, as the patron saint of all wilful boys suspected of genius and convicted at least of its infirmities. He belonged to the melancholy class of wasted men, like the German Hoffmann, whom perhaps of all men of genius he most resembled. No doubt, if we are to apply any standard of moral weight or sanity to authors, a proposal which Poe would doubtless have ridiculed, it can only be in a very large and generous way. If a career has only a manly ring to it, we can forgive many errors, as in reading, for instance, the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, carrying always his life in his hand amid a brilliant and reckless society. But the existence of a poor Bohemian, besotted when he has money, angry and vindictive when the money is spent, this is a dismal tragedy, for which genius only makes the footlights burn with more lustre. There is a passage in Keats's letters, written from the haunts of Burns, in which he expresses himself as filled with pity for the poet's life: "he drank with blackguards, he was miserable; we can see horribly clear in the works of such a man his life, as if we were God's spies." Yet Burns's sins and miseries left his heart unspoiled, and this cannot be said of Poe. After all, the austere virtues-the virtues of Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier-are the best soil for genius. I like best to think of Poe as associated with his betrothed, Sarah Helen Whitman, whom I saw sometimes in her later years. That gifted woman had outlived her early friends and loves and hopes, and perhaps her literary fame, such as it was: she had certainly outlived her recognized ties with Poe, and all but his memory. There she dwelt in her little suite of rooms, bearing youth still in her heart and in her voice, and on her hair also, and in her dress. Her dimly-lighted parlor was always decked, here and there, with scarlet; and she sat, robed in white, with her back always turned to the light, thus throwing a discreetly-tinted shadow over her still thoughtful and noble face. She seemed a person embalmed while still alive it was as if she might dwell forever there, prolonging into an indefinite future the tradition of a poet's love; and when we remembered that she had been Poe's betrothed, that his kisses had touched her lips, that she still believed in him and was his defender, all criticism might well, for her sake, be disarmed, and her saintly life atone for his stormy and sad career. REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF SLAVERY. GEORGE BANCROFT. [A biographical notice of the distinguished author of "The History of the United States" is hardly called for. We need only say that he was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1800, studied in the Universities of Harvard and Göttingen, and commenced his historical labors by the "History of the Colonization of the United States," of which the first volume appeared in 1834. The tenth and concluding volume of this great historical work was published in 1874. As an historian Bancroft occupies an exalted position, his work being noted alike for conscientiousness in the study of authorities, critical judgment in selection of materials, fluency of style, picturesque descriptive powers, acute reasoning, and great erudition. It takes its place among the great histories of the world.] WHILE Virginia, by the concession of a representative government, was constituted the asylum of liberty, it be came the abode of hereditary bondsmen. Slavery and the slave-trade are older than the records of human society: they are found to have existed wherever the savage hunter began to assume the habits of pas |