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By Root 16945 0

quite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal of American letters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood of Boston, and it was ill-prepared to believe that anything poetical could deserve salvation if it proceeded from a place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, the son of Irish strolling players, called "The Virginia Comedians," settled in the South and was educated in England. By an odd coincidence, it now appears that he actually was a native, as it were by accident, of Boston itself. In the words of the Psalmist, "Lo! there was he born!" This Gentile poet, such was the then state of American literature, could not arrive on earth elsewhere than in the Jerusalem of Massachusetts. But that concession was not known to the high priests, the Lowells, the Holmeses, the Nortons, to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder from Javan or Gadire.

Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality as to find himself isolated. Everything new is regarded with suspicion and dislike by the general world of readers, and usually by the leaders of criticism as well. Yet the daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaron and his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded Poe, Wordsworth and Coleridge had been derided, but they had enjoyed the emphatic approbation of one another and of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah of letters, yet he was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. Even Keats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch reviewers behind the confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and Reynolds. At a still later moment Rossetti and Morris would shelter themselves securely, and even serenely, from the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower of the praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set against the stupidity of the world at large the comfortable cleverness of a few strong persons of taste, founded, as all good taste must be, upon principles. The poet could pride himself on his eclecticism, on his recognition within, as Keats said, "a little clan." But Poe's misfortune was to have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely those persons who represented, and on the whole justly represented, good taste in America.

His behaviour in this predicament was what might have been expected from a man whose genius was more considerable than his judgment or his manners. He tried, at first, to conciliate the New England authorities, and he flattered not merely the greater planets but some of the very little stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher P. Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that his blandishments were of no avail, he turned savage, and tried to prove that he did not care, by being rude to Bryant and Longfellow. He called the whole solemn Sanhedrim a college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, he closed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central aim and object of the excellent men who at that time ruled American literature was to prove that, in what this impertinent young man from Virginia called the Frog Pond, the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the recognition of Europe, which began to flow in richly just as Poe ceased to be able to enjoy it, the prestige of this remarkable poet might have been successfully annihilated.

Nor was it only the synod of Boston wits who issued the edict that he should be ignored, but in England also many good judges of literature, especially those who belonged to the intellectual rather than the artistic class, could not away with him. I recollect hearing Leslie Stephen say, now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms of praise for Poe was "simply preposterous." And one whom I admire so implicitly that I will not mention his name in a context which is not favourable to his judgment, wrote (in his haste) of Poe's "singularly valueless verses."

This opposition, modified, it is true, by the very different attitude adopted by Tennyson and most subsequent English poets, as well as by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the whole