POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 4' 



the quality of his insight, the fibre of his art, the diminishing 

 energy of his mind. He paid in the blighting interruptions 

 of his work, his increasing detachment from men, his dimin- 

 ishing independence, the confusion of his affairs, the pre- 

 mature disintegration of his delicately endowed spirit. This 

 is an eld story; it was told and retold 1>y his contemporaries; 

 none knew so well as he; none felt its tragic blight so deeply 

 as he. But must it be retold year after year as if it were 

 the positive achievement and not the negative limitation: as it 

 it were the sum total of a career rather than an incident in 

 that career, impossible to overlook hut always to he kept 

 subordinate? Is there no statute of limitations against weak 

 nesses of the body when the spirit is brought into judgment? 

 Is the light of the torch to he denied because the hand that 

 holds it sometimes wavers? Are we still so far from an 

 understanding of life that we confuse the power of seeing 

 weaknesses and offences with the ability to measure that 

 relation of resistance to temptation which is the one determin- 

 ing factor in moral judgment 



In its judgment of men of genius whose careers have been 

 marked by moral confusion, wrote Carlyle in his noble essay 

 on Burns, the world is habitually unjust: "unjust on many 

 grounds, of winch this one may be stated as the substance: 

 It decides, like a court of law. by dead statutes: and not 

 positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on 

 what is or is not done wrong." When two ships conic to 

 anchorage: one clean and sound, with masts straight and sails 

 white, and the other blackened and stained, with broken spars 

 and torn sails; before you pronounce judgment find out what 

 voyages they have made: one may have crossed the harbor 

 and the other may have come round the world! Men and 

 women who have never been outside the harbor are prone to 

 love judgment and pursue it with ignorant assurance. 



Let us concede, too. the limitations of l'oe's art. to keep for 

 the moment on the negative side of his work with main of 

 his critics: let us frankly recognize that be was a man of 



