18 LITEEAKY VALUES 



Saxon. Hence his deepest impression seems to have 

 been made upon the French mind. In all our New 

 England poets the voice of humanity, of patriot- 

 ism, of religious ideas, of strenuous moral purpose, 

 speaks. Art is subordinated to various human pas- 

 sions and emotions. In Poe alone are these emo- 

 tions subordinated to art. In Poe alone is the 

 effort mainly a verbal and technical one. In him 

 alone is the man lost in the artist. To evoke music 

 from language is his constant aim. No other Ameri- 

 can poet approaches him in this kind of verbal mastery, 

 in this unfettered creative technical power. In ease, 

 in splendor, in audacity, he is like a bird. One 

 may understand and admire him and not be touched 

 by him. To be moved to anything but admiration 

 is foreign to pure art. Would one make meat and 

 drink of it? Our reading is selfish, we seek our 

 own, we are drawn to the book that is going our 

 way. Can we - appreciate beyond our own personal 

 tastes and needs ? Can we see the excellence of the 

 impersonal and the disinterested ? We want to be 

 touched in some special and intimate way ; but art 

 touches us in a general and impersonal way. No 

 one could take to himself Shakespeare, or Milton's 

 " Lycidas," or Keats's odes as directed especially 

 to his own personal wants and aspirations. We for- 

 get ourselves in reading these things, and share for 

 the time the sentiment of pure art, which lives in 

 the universal. How crude the art of Whittier com- 

 pared with that of Poe, and yet Whittier has touched 

 and moved his countrymen, and Poe has not. There 



