52 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



the principles of the art of writing". His touch on his con- 

 temporaries who won the easy successes which are always 

 within reach in untrained communities was often caustic, as it 

 had need to be; hut the instinct which made him the enemy 

 of inferior work gave him also the power of recognizing 

 the work of the artist, even when it came from unknown 

 hands. He discerned the reality of imagination in Hawthorne 

 and Tennyson as clearly as he saw the vulgarity and crudity 

 of much of the popular writing of his time. Bv critical 

 intention, therefore, as well as by virtue of the possession of 

 genius, which is never provincial, Poe emancipated himself, 

 and went far to emancipate American literature, from the 

 narrow" spirit, the partial judgment, and the inferior standards 

 of a people not yet familiar with the best that has been thought 

 and said in the world. To the claims of local pride he opposed 

 the sovereign claims of art; against the practice of the half- 

 inspired and the wholly untrained he set the practice of the 

 masters. When the intellectual history of the country is 

 written, he will appear as one of its foremost liberators. 



Poe's work holds a first place in our literature, not by reason 

 of its mass, its reality, its range, its spiritual or ethical sig- 

 nificance, but by reason of its complete and beautiful indi- 

 viduality, the distinction of its form and workmanship, the 

 purity of its art. With Hawthorne he shares the primacy 

 among all who have enriched our literature with prose or 

 verse of high artistic quality; but, unlike his great contem- 

 porary, he has had to wait long for adequate and just recogni- 

 tion. His time of waiting" is not yet over: for while the 

 ethical insight of Hawthorne finds quick response where his 

 artistic power alone would fail to move, Poe must he content 

 with the suffrages of those who know that the art which he 

 practiced with such magical effect is in itself a kind of 

 righteousness. " 1 could not afford to spare from my circle," 

 wrote Emerson to a friend, " a poet, so long as he can offer so 

 indisputable a token as a good poem of his relation to what 

 is highest in Being." To those who understand that char- 



