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Your letter — I was indeed rejoiced to learn that you had recovered from your illness — and a reason of this rejoicing, though perhaps an unreasonable one, is that the information tended partly to falsify a report which I had seen not long before in a number of the Phil. Sat. E. Post. It was in this wise — “It is said that Edgar A. Poe is lying dangerously ill with the brain fever, and that his wife is in the last stages of consumption — they are without money, and without friends,” etc. — you saw it, I suppose? When I first read it I feared that it contained too much truth, as indeed it did, it appears, for you were sick. But, taking into consideration the misrepresentations an(d) excommunications of you at other times by this very sagacious and very upright paper, I thought that it might not be entitled to full credit. No doubt the Post wished the report might be true.

By the way, what about that work on Conchology which the Post accuses you of purloining from an English author — did you copy it bodily, and put your name to it? If so, it was a “bold step,” and “should be among Mr. Griswold’s “Curiosities of American Literature.” I wouldn’t wish to encourage plagiarising (Is there any such verb as plagiarise?), but if the act had been mine, I believe I should be proud to have it published to the world. It would show the haughty English that we could borrow as ingeniously (the same kind of ingenuity that Dupin employed in recovering the purloined letter) though we didn’t as often. But it seems strange to me that so daring a deed should have been kept thus secret, and that no more has been said of it since the secret was revealed — will you tell us about it? —

Of plagiarism — the idea touching the subject which you have expressed in your “Opinions” of James Aldrich is mine also. “What the poet admires does become a portion of his own soul,” whether he find it in a book by a brother or father poet, or in the volume of Nature. His imagination can only combine (footnote to “Opinions” of Willis) — and his productions, however much of originality they may seem to possess, will be but reproductions. Fortunate for him if he reproduce from the Genius who has written the poetry of the flying spheres.

I like your division of intellect, mind, or whatever it may be -into imagination, fancy, fantasy, and humor. It makes it convenient in telling of merit of different kinds. From among your poems I select “The Raven” as a specimen of the fanciful, though occasionally pretty closely verging upon the fantastical, and though in many parts it speaks the pure imagination — for examples of the latter —

“And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me filled me with fantastic terrors”

and —

“Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by angels whose faint foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.” —

This tinkling business I still consider business done not exactly by the square rule, though I understand your meaning, and though I would by no means like to see it bettered.

Among the other poems are “The Lake —— To ——” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The Sleeper” which I should put down as especially imaginative. The first mentioned strikes me the most favorably of any of, your youthful pieces, considering its length. “The Sleeper” suits me — inspires me, wouldn’t this be a better term? — beyond any thing I have read of yours. “It seems the very breathing of a soul from out the ethereal world. But I should hardly as quick think of telling wherein lies its beauty, as of telling in what consists that of ocean murmurs or the sighing of the wind among pine-leaves, or of the “last quiver of a bell that dies we know not where.” There is beauty in these to me. Indeed, it appears to me that only in such as these, the sad, the dreamy, the vague, the far-away — seeming as if just passing the confines of earth to loose itself in heaven — it appears to me that in such alone can be found the beauty with which poetry has to do.

I think it must be this kind of beauty that you have reference