you vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What

"irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense
of wrong," drove you (in Mr. Longfellow's own words) to attack his

pure and beneficent Muse we may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow
forgave you easily; for pardon comes easily to the great. It was

the smaller men, the Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that knew not
how to forget. "The New Yorkers never forgave him," says your

latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of
their malice. It was not individual vanity alone, but the whole

literary class that you assailed. "As a literary people," you
wrote, "we are one vast perambulating humbug." After that

declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the
vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and

writing still. He who knows them need not linger over the attacks
and defences of your personal character; he will not waste time on

calumnies, tale-bearing, private letters, and all the noisome dust
which takes so long in settling above your tomb.

For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your
pen, and that in an age when the author of "To Helen" and "The Cask

of Amontillado" was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When
such poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep

than that of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton's, were
inevitable and assured. No man was less fortunate than you in the

moment of his birth--infelix opportunitate vitae. Had you lived a
generation later, honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at

home, would all have been yours. Within thirty years so great a
change has passed over the profession of letters in America; and it

is impossible to estimate the rewards which would have fallen to
Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of

"Called Back." It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in
the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite

unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a
respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as

"objectional" in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what
is meant by such a sentence as "his connection with it had inured to

his own benefit by the frequent puffs of himself," and so forth.
Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer

of short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and
elaborate poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own

brief definition of poetry, "the rhythmic creation of the
beautiful," exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory

illustrated by the poems. Natural bent, and reaction against the
example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of

what you call the "didactic" element in verse. Even if morality be
not seven-eighths of our life (the exact portion" target="_blank" title="n.比率 vt.使成比例">proportion as at present

estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for
gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be

the largest public.
"Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry," so you

wrote; "the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which
should be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely

what we should aim at in poetry." You aimed at that mark, and
struck it again and again, notably in "Helen, thy beauty is to me,"

in "The Haunted Palace," "The Valley of Unrest," and "The City in
the Sea." But by some Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been

foreseen, you are, to the world, the poet of one poem--"The Raven:"
a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the

"exaltation" (what there is of it) by no means particularly "vague."
So a portion of the public know little of Shelley but the "Skylark,"

and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the raven, bear each
of them a poet's name, vivu' per ora virum. Your theory of poetry,

if accepted, would make you (after the author of "Kubla Khan") the
foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would come

Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote "Golden Wings," "The Blue
Closet," and "The Sailing of the Sword;" and, close up, Mr. Lear,

the author of "The Yongi Bongi Bo," an the lay of the "Jumblies."
On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you

consigned Moliere. If we may judge a theory by its results, when
compared with the deliberateverdict of the world, your aesthetic

does not seem to hold water. The "Odyssey" is not really inferior
to "Ulalume," as it ought to be if your doctrine of poetry were

correct, nor "Le Festin de Pierre" to "Undine." Yet you deserve the
praise of having been constant, in your poetic practice, to your

poetic principles--principles commonly deserted by poets who, like
Wordsworth, have published their aesthetic system. Your pieces are

few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like Fielding, "a barren
rascal." But how can a writer's verses be numerous if with him, as

with you, "poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . . which cannot
at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations or the

more paltry commendations of mankind!" Of you it may be said, more
truly than Shelley said it of himself, that "to ask you for anything

human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton."
Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of

poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a

single string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the
grave. You chose, or you were destined

To vary from the kindly race of men;
and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your

reputation.
For your stories has been reserved a boundlesspopularity, and that

highest success--the success of a perfectlysympathetic translation.
By this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your

translator, M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your
views about Mr. Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so

energetically resisted all those ideas of "progress" which "came
from Hell or Boston." On this point, however, the world continues

to differ from you and M. Baudelaire, and perhaps there is only the
choice between our optimism and universalsuicide or universal

opium-eating. But to discuss your ultimate ideas is perhaps a
profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.

An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described
them as "Hawthorne and delirium tremens." I am not aware that

extreme orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress
towards a predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of

delirium. If they be, then there is a deal of truth in the
criticism, and a good deal of delirium tremens in your style. But

your ingenuity, your completeness, your occasional luxuriance of
fancy and wealth of jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which

Mr. Hawthorne had at his command. He was a great writer--the
greatest writer in prose fiction whom America has produced. But you

and he have not much in common, except a certain mortuary turn of
mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the workings of

conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of

American fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you
laid down about brevity and the steady working to one single effect.

Probably you would not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your
leading virtue) of Mr. Roe, now your countrymen's favourite

novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he is eminently uninspired.
In the works of one who is, what you were called yourself, a

Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute observation, the
subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute of humour

as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear, the
charm of "Daisy Miller." You would admit the unity of effect

secured in "Washington Square," though that effect is as remote as
possible from the terror of "The House of Usher" or the vindictive

triumph of "The Cask of Amontillado."
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius

tethered to the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among canaille,
a poet among poetasters, dowered with a scholar's taste without a

scholar's training, embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all
unsupported by his consolations.

LETTER--To Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
Rodono, St. Mary's Loch:

Sept. 8, 1885.
Sir,--In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the

favour of all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an