The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1689]
Both his growing power of analysis and his highly developed artistic feeling were brought into full play in this review work. Under his guidance the writings of his contemporaries, whether they were the little authors or the giants such as, in England, Tennyson (who was a prime favorite with him), Macauley, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett, or in America, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Irving, Emerson, stood forth illumined—the weak spots laid bare, the strong points gleaming bright.
He unfalteringly declared his admiration of Hawthorne (then almost unknown) in which the future so fully justified him. The tales of Hawthorne, he declared, belonged to "the highest region of Art—an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order."
Even the work of the little authors was indebted to him for many a good word, but the little authors hated him and returned the brilliant sallies his pungent pen directed toward their writings with vollies of mud aimed at his private character.
No matter what his subject, however, Edgar Poe always wrote with power—with intensity. He seemed by turns to dip his pen into fire, into gall, into vitriol—at times into his own heart's blood.
Of the last named type was the story "Eleonora," which appeared, not in Graham's, but in The Gift for the new year, and wherein was set forth in phrases like strung jewels the story of the "Valley of the Many-Colored Grass." The whole fabric of this loveliest of his conceptions is like a web wrought in some fairy loom of bright strands of silk of every hue, and studded with fairest gems. In it is no hint of the gruesome, or the sombre—even though the Angel of Death is there. It is all pure beauty—a perfect flower from the fruitful tree of his genius at the height of its power.
All of Edgar Poe's work gains much by being read aloud, for the eye alone cannot fully grasp the music that is in his prose as well as his verse. "Eleonora" was read aloud in every city and hamlet of the United States, and at firesides far from the beaten paths—the traveled roads—that led to the cities; for it was written when every word from the pen of Edgar Poe was looked for, waited for, with eager impatience, and when Graham's Magazine had been made in one little year, by his writing, and the writing of others whom he had induced to contribute to its pages, to lead the thought of the day in America.
And the success of The Dreamer made him a lion in the "City of Brotherly Love" as it had made him a lion in Richmond. The doors of the most exclusive—the most cultivated—homes of that fastidious city stood open to welcome him. The loveliest women, whether the grey ladies of the "Society of Friends" or the brightly plumaged birds of the gayer world, smiled their sweetest upon him. As he walked along the streets passers-by would whisper to one another,
"There goes Mr. Poe. Did you notice his eyes? They say he has the most expressive eyes in Philadelphia."
Throughout this year of almost dazzling triumph the little cottage with its rose-hooded porch, in Spring Garden, had been a veritable snug harbor to The Dreamer. In winter when the deep, spotless snow lay round about it, in spring when the violets and hyacinths came back to the garden-spot and the singing birds to the trees that overhung it, in summer when the climbing green rose was heavy with bloom and in autumn when the wind whistled around it, but there was a bright blaze upon the hearth inside, his heart turned joyously many times a day, and his feet at eventide, when his work at the office in the city was over, toward this sacred haven.
And Edgar the Dreamer was happy. He should have been rich and would have been but for the meagre returns from literary