and style, for instance, is English; his sentiment is essentially English. But we are now beginning to get acquainted with writers amongst the Americans who are really national-in the sense that American apples are national. Emerson has a distinct smack of the rich and sunny West; just as the honey in Madeira tastes of violets. Lowell's humour in the Biglow Papers" is as gloriously Yankee as Burns's humour is gloriously Scotch. Is not the genius of Hawthorne a real native product? And from whom but an American could we have expected such a book as we had the other day in the Whale of Herman Melville? such a fresh daring book-wild, and yet true-with its quaint spiritual portraits looking ancient and also fresh, as though Puritanism had been kept fresh in the salt water over there, and were looking out living upon us once more. These writers one sees, at all events, have our old English virtue of pluck. They think what they please, and say what they think. And while M'Fungus is concocting philosophical histories in the style of the last century with drums on our ears, these other open-hearted men are getting into all our hearts, and making themselves friends by our firesides. An Englishman ought to require no apology from one who introduces an American Poet to him. I have undertaken this office very cheerfully with regard to EDGAR ALLAN POE. I owe his acquaintance, as I owe much of the happiness of my life, to the society of friends devoted to art and poetry. His music has made several summers brighter for me; and now that his reputation (the man himself died just three years ago) is appealing for recognition to the English "reading public," I feel that I ought to say a few words about him. At all events, this notice may serve as a finger-post to direct the wanderer to a tumulus as worthy of honour as any that has been made on the earth lately. EDGAR ALLAN POE was a native of Virginia; and as Virginia is richer in good families than other American States, we learn that he was of honourable descent. The name is not a common one in England. There was a Dr. Poe, physician to Queen Elizabeth; and there is a highly-respectable family of the name in Ireland who bear the same coatarmour as the doctor. The poet's great-grandfather, who married a daughter of Admiral M'Bride, was probably of the same stock. His son was a quartermaster-general in the American line; and his grandson David, the poet's father-commencing an "eccentricity" which, as we shall see, ran in the blood afterwards-married an enchanting actress of uncertain prospects. Having achieved .this, David Poe (who was a younger son) took to acting himself; but both he and his wife died young, leaving three children destitute. Edgar (who was born at Baltimore in January, 1811) accordingly began the world,-for he was thrown thus early on his "own resources,”—as naked as a cherub. Mr. Allan, a rich gentleman, who had no children of his own, adopted Edgar, brought him to England, where he put him to school at Stoke-Newington. Edgar, who was a "spoilt child,"-a beautiful, witty, precocious boy,-remained at school there for some five years. In 1822 he returned to the United States; went to the academy at Richmond; and thence to the University at Charlottesville. Always he signalized himself by early intellect, quickly learning all that came in his way, brilliant, vivacious, passionate, always-but always "eccentric" in proportion; so that, what with intemperance and insubordination, this youth, 66 To whom was given So much of earth, so much of heaven, -was expelled from the University. Distant ru mours, and what fly faster than even rumoursbills, kept Mr. Allan informed of the youth's progress. Mr. A., who seems to have been a goodnatured old gentleman of the school of MICIO in the Adelphi, could pardon a great deal; but there are limits to the patience even of a MICIO. Edgar, finding that his bills recoiled on himself as boomerangs do, seems to have tried his satire on the worthy man; and after writing a sharp letter, went off to the Mediterranean to free the Greeks from the Turkish yoke. We rarely hear of a more heroic project! I like to think of Poe in the Mediterranean. With his passionate love of the Beautiful-in "the years of April blood," in a climate which has the perpetual luxury of a bath,-he must have had all his perceptions of the lovely intensified wonderfully. What he did there we have now no means of discovering. He never reached the scene of war, which was, doubtless, a great loss to the Greeks; but he turned up—whence or how no man knows—in St. Petersburg. The American Minister, it seems, had to relieve the youth from "temporary embarrassment;" and he returned to his native land. He now appears to have thought it was time for his friends to exert themselves. Mr. Allan was once more kind and forgiving, and Edgar was entered as a cadet at the Military Academy. In the groves of that academy he did not remain long, we may be sure; the fact was, he was "cashiered." It seems to have been about this time that he published, while still a boy, his first volume of poems -those comprised in his later collections as "Poems written in Youth." I agree with all that Lowell says of their wonderful precocity, though I by no means agree with Lowell in his depreciation of Chatterton. B There are, of course, obvious traces of imitation, adoptions of the metres of Scott, imitations of the verse of Byron. But there is the keenest feeling for the Beautiful, which was the predominant feeling of Poe's whole life; there is the loveliest, easiest, joyfullest flow of music throughout. There is, too, what must have been almost instinctive, an exquisite taste-a taste which lay at the very centre of his intellect like a conscience. We should notice here two phenomena in this volume, both of importance to one who wants to understand Poe as man and poet. There is no trace of any depth of spiritual feeling; no "questioning of destiny;" none of those traces of deep inward emotion which, like the marks of tears, we see on the face of so many a modern muse. On the other hand, though it appears only too certain that his wild passions carried him into most unhappy self-abandonment, his verse is all as pure as wild flowers. This is the way in which the boy Edgar-the rejected of the Military Academy, the rake of Charlottesville, noted for "intemperance" and "other vices "--writes about a girl:- To Helen. Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicéan barks of yore |