The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [902]
It is difficult to conceive anything more ludicrously out of keeping than the thoughts of these stanzas and the petit-maître, fidgety, hop-skip-and-jump air of the words and the Liliputian parts of the versification.
A somewhat similar metre is adopted by Mr. C. in his “Lines on Hearing Triumphant Music,” but as the subject is essentially different, so the effect is by no means so displeasing. I copy one of the stanzas as the noblest individual passage which I can find among all the poems of its author.
That glorious strain!
Oh, from my brain
I see the shadows flitting like scared ghosts.
A 1ight — a light
Shines in to-night
Round the good angels trooping to their posts,
And the black cloud is rent in twain
Before the ascending strain.
Mr. Cranch is well educated, and quite accomplished. Like Mr. Osborn, he is musician, painter, and poet, being in each capacity very respectably successful.
He is about thirty-three or four years of age; in height, perhaps five feet eleven; athletic; front face not unhandsome — the forehead evincing intellect, and the smile pleasant; but the profile is marred by the turning up of the nose, and, altogether is hard and disagreeable. His eyes and hair are dark brown — the latter worn short, slightly inclined to curl. Thick whiskers meeting under the chin, and much out of keeping with the shirtcollar à la Byron. Dresses with marked plainness. He is married.
SARAH MARGARET FULLER.
MISS FULLER was at one time editor, or one of the editors of “The Dial,” to which she contributed many of the most forcible and certainly some of the most peculiar papers. She is known, too, by “Summer on the Lakes,” a remarkable assemblage of sketches, issued in 1844, by Little & Brown, of Boston. More lately she has published “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” a work which has occasioned much discussion, having had the good fortune to be warmly abused and chivalrously defended. At present, she is assistant editor of “The New York Tribune,” or rather a salaried contributor to that journal, for which she has furnished a great variety of matter, chiefly critical notices of new books, etc., etc., her articles being designated by an asterisk. Two of the best of them were a review of Professor Longfellow’s late magnificent edition of his own works, (with a portrait,) and an appeal to the public in behalf of her friend Harro Harring. The review did her infinite credit; it was frank, candid, independent — in even ludicrous contrast to the usual mere glorifications of the day, giving honor only where honor was due, yet evincing the most thorough capacity to appreciate and the most sincere intention to place in the fairest light the real and idiosyncratic merits of the poet.
In my opinion it is one of the very few reviews of Longfellow’s poems, ever published in America, of which the critics have not had abundant reason to be ashamed. Mr. Longfellow is entitled to a certain and very distinguished rank among the poets of his country, but that country is disgraced by the evident toadyism which would award to his social position and influence, to his fine paper and large type, to his morocco binding and gilt edges, to his flattering portrait of himself, and to the illustrations of his poems by Huntingdon, that amount of indiscriminate approbation which neither could nor would have been given to the poems themselves.
The defence of Harro Harring, or rather the Philippic against those who were doing him wrong, was one of the most eloquent and well-put articles I have ever yet seen in a newspaper.
“Woman in the Nineteenth Century” is a book which few women in the country could have written, and no woman in the country would have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller. In the way of independence, of unmitigated radicalism, it is one of the “Curiosities of American Literature,” and Doctor Griswold should include it in his book. I need scarcely say that the essay is nervous, forcible, thoughtful, suggestive, brilliant, and to a certain extent scholar-like — for all