104 BEYIEW — TALES OE MYSTERY AST) POEMS. 



persons wlio ever lived was contained, and on which the remains of 

 her he had loved with love passing the love of woman, were hence- 

 forth to rest." How strange the contrast of one whom even we 

 who know him only by his writings cannot help loving, with this 

 author who, like him, expresses such unmistakeable individuality 

 and self-originating characteristics on every page,, but only to make 

 us admire with shuddering ; as one might gaze on the cold glitter- 

 ing pinnacles of polar ice -cliffs. The poet Lowell has been called in 

 to aid in setting forth the true attributes of his genius, but he 

 had already stamped his just estimate of him in the pungent terse- 

 ness of a stanza of his " Fable of Critics :" 



" Here comes foe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, 

 Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge ; 

 He has written some things far the best of their kind, 

 But some how the heart seems squeezed out by the mind !" 



Grenius Poe unquestionably had ; with eccentricities too, enough 

 to furnish any ordinary half dozen of the irritable race of poets, 

 critics, and editors. But the selfishness of morbid sneering cyni- 

 cism never took a colder and more repellant aspect ; and we look 

 back upon him with a strange sadness as on one of the gifted con- 

 tributors to the permanent stock of our sources of literary pleasure, 

 whom yet it is all impossible to love. In the prose of Poe, with 

 its odd matter-of-fact anatomising of mystery, there is a singular 

 artificiality of art that seems too much to betray the wires and 

 pulleys of the puppet-master ; but few as are his poems, it is difficult 

 to believe the heart so well simulated, if no genial pulsation of 

 human affection and sympathy actually throbbed beneath that cynic 

 heart of his. To these, therefore, the rare and brief out-gushings, 

 as it might seem, of the genuine feeling of " man of woman born," 

 we shall devote such brief space as the demands on our pages 

 admit, in this notice of Edgar Allan Poe ; remembering that 

 for him, instead of the hero-worship, which fondly exaggerates the 

 virtues of a favorite author, while "to his faults a little blind," it 

 has been till now his fate to be coarsely anatomised by those who 

 have proved only too willing to expose his frailties, if not to deepen 

 the shadows of his dark life-picture. For this there can beno ex- 

 cuse, for whatever his frailties as a man, no charge can be brought 

 against him of having pandered his genius, or wielded his pen in the 

 cause of vice. 



The following brief but touching lyric, is dedicated — we may pre- 

 sume.— to the memory of the same " rare and radiant maiden whom 



