Text: William Brighty Rands, “American Literature: Poe; Hawthorne,” Tati's Edinburgh Magazine, (Edinburgh: UK), vol. XXII, no. 1, January 1855, pp. 33-41

[page 33:]

WE think American literature has received rather supercilious treatment by critics on this side of Mrs. Partington's pool. It has been found wanting in originality, in nationality, in force, and in no one knows what besides. Those who pronounce it a vile imitation and by no means the genuine article, are sufficiently answered by the now hackneyed, and at all times very obvious remark, that it is necessarily and properly a continuation of our own literature, though not a copy in any unfavourable sense. Why the Anglo-Saxon intellect, sent across the Atlantic, should have suffered such a miraculous “sea-change into something (rich and) strange” as to yield, within a few decades, quite new and astonishing things, is not clear to ourselves; and the reasons must lie at least “full fathom five,” if there be any. In the feast of reason and flow of soul to which our own children invite us, we naturally expect the good old viands, and ought to be content if we can trace their budding powers in varied and luxuriant trimmings. We are not even disposed to make the reservation that a “national literature” must be a thing of time and growth. We cherish the belief that such points of distinction as now appear between the mental products of English and American intellect, are destined rather to undergo a process of resolution and assimilation than of further differentiation; a process which shall reduce them to mere matters of local allusion and verbal peculiarity, such as exist between Yorkshire and Middlesex. We will not have the grand chain snapped, because this link is called England and that link is called America. The torch shall not burn white in our grasp, and blue in the hands to which we have passed it. We want no American poet to arise, of whom our descendants shall say he is a “nationally” different genius from Shakspeare, in the sense in which Calderon, or Schiller, or Corneille, is different from our idol. We look forward — Heaven forbid! — to no transatlantic philosopher or divine, regarding whom our immensely-great-grand-children shall have to say, “See what generical differences have arisen in the American and English mind since the days when Carlyle and Emerson, Channing and Arnold, could be named in the same breath.” What we do expect is indefinite “development” [column 2:] on both sides of the “vexed Atlantic,” with that mutual give and take in culture which is so characteristic of Anglo-Saxon progress.

It is sometimes inattention, sometimes national pride, and still more frequently a total forgetfulness of the question of nation, that keeps us from appreciating the large influence which American intellect has, through some of its favourite exponents, acquired over English intellect. For we think a little observation and reflection will satisfy any one that, among the authors who have most powerfully assisted in moulding middle-class thought and feeling in this country — (Carlyle has a sphere of his own which the term middle-class does not express) — the author of “Evangeline,” “Excelsior,” “Hyperion,” “Kavanagh,” and that “Psalm of Life” which has perhaps been more quoted than any entire poem of our day or of any day, must take rank after Dickens. Mr. Longfellow would no doubt ridicule, with his great master Göthe, any assumption on the part of his literary countrymen of that sort of originality which seems expected from them: —

Which may be rendered, supposing it possible to “render” an Epigram: —

Indeed, we have on record in “Kavanagh,” in the conversation between Mr. Churchill and the Editor of the “Extinguisher,” what Mr. Longfellow thinks about the relations of our own literature and that of his country: —

If Mr. Longfellow anticipates a special mission [page 34:] for American Literature, it would seem to be — universality:

In the “Mosses from an old Manse,” one of the authors whose names stand at the head of this paper treats the subject of American Literature, in one or two places, with a badinage that lets us into nothing but the indecision and vagueness of the writer's own conclusions. Mr. Hawthorne is quite alive to the palpable imitation to be found in some of his contemporaries; for he makes the madman “P.,” in that ‘ Correspondence’”’ which shows us the dead, alive, and the living, dead, say that Keats, “‘who has never got over the terrible bleeding at the lungs, caused by the Article on his ‘Endymion’ in the Quarterly,” is engaged on an epic poem; and the lunatic is made to add —

Then again, Mr. Hawthorne tells us, that at the “select pleasure party” given by the “Man of Fancy,” at his “Castle in the Air, in the realm of Nowhere,” (by the bye, “Nowhere” is a dreary place for a pleasure party: could not Mr. Hawthorne be satisfied with laying the, scene in some vague, but not absolutely hopeless, “Weissnichtwo”?) there

When we ask for the most original writer yet produced by America, we are at once directed to Edgar Allan Poe and reminded of “The Raven: a Poem.”* We, personally, have nothing to object against the statement that Poe is the most original of American authors, so long as in admitting the “originality” we are not supposed to yield him the very highest rank in the literature of the New World. This is quite another thing, though, we fear, not generally understood to be so. We give Poe the foremost place in his class, but that class is not the highest. We should not even quarrel with the critic who should place him altogether ‘ alone in his glory,” and apart from any class whatever; only let the “glory” be that of a wonderful ‘combination of qualities, and not that of a real individuality of genius. A work of genius is the result of the spontaneous and harmonious exercise (or outflow) of any number of faculties, excited to such a degree of activity that the product shall be homogeneous (we mean no pun), and exclude the idea of process. With all that Poe has written (as far as we know) fully present to our minds, we are prepared to deny that he has left behind him any such work. We concede to him —

1. Extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled, powers of analysis, and of retention;

2. Great command of language;

3. Very great imitative and constructive tact;

4. An ideality sufficiently intense to tinge, (but not to saturate and deeply colour), all his conceptions:

5. All these receiving a special direction from a love of the wonderful and mysterious, and a gloomy morale, in which a sense of the terrible was an ever[[-]]present influence.

This combination of powerful elements does not, however, make the thing called genius. The mere fact that we can dissect Poe's work, draw woof from warp, pass the light through the prism, resolve the product into its constituents; that we find what we are admiring is, chemically speaking, a mixture and not a solution, — [page 35:] is conclusive against our applying to it the word which should be sacred to pure creations of the mind. Find your way inside Shakspere, and tell us how he “did it.” Tennyson is laborious, and his poetry might smell of the lamp; but take his best verses, and tell us which came first in the order of the poet's work — words or thoughts; the sentiment pure and simple, or the embodying image. Take a humbler singer, “warbling his native wood-notes wild” — our own Gerald Massey, or Poe's young countryman, Thomas Buchanan Read (may he never “unbeseem the promise of his spring”!); and pull his poetry to pieces, — if you can. Not to confine your experiments to poetry, make similar trial of prose-writers of never-disputed genius. Try and dissect the compositions of Bacon, of Jeremy Taylor, of quaint old Fuller, of John Bunyan, of Charles Lamb, of Hood (as a humorist), or of Dickens, Thackeray, and De Quincey, at their best. You will be baffled. The thing is not to be managed. You can’t see how they did it! But with the work of men like Macaulay, and Bulwer, and Prescott, and Hazlitt, you feel that the task of analysis is merely a matter of greater or less application; even though intellectual boundary lines cannot always be made “as plain as the old hill of Howth,” and though talent and genius may here and there melt into each other. So with Edgar Poe. You can see, for the most part, the skeleton-frame which he has so fearfully and wonderfully overlaid; the process is visible to steady scrutiny; that miraculous interfusion of spirit and expression which produces homogeneity is not there. Run your eye down his pages, and confront us if you can, with a few sentences fitted to dwell in the memory of universal man. It will not answer to show us adaptations of sound to sense; which exist in plenty. All that is mere matter of imitation more or less artistic. Coups de théâtre are cheap, but where are “the apples of gold set in network of silver”? We humbly, but distinctly, assert that Poe was a consummate artist, but not a genius; and we may perhaps be pardoned for mentioning (to guard against a threatening misconception) that long before we heard the story of his writing ‘ The Raven,”’ we had arrived at the (to us) obvious conclusion that that extraordinary poem was mechanically written; that it was a work of pathos prepense.

Our estimate of Poe would not be complete, if we omitted to specify what we deny, as well as what we concede to him. We cannot allow Poe to have possessed more than an infinitesmal endowment of either Conscience or Affection. About the first of these items, there will perhaps be little dispute: it has, indeed, been pretty generally recognised that the man was a creature of wonderful powers in whose composition “conscience had been left out.” But we do not know that it has ever been noticed that in all his writings there is no development of any sentiment or idea that is strictly moral. [column 2:] This, in the midst of so much keen and minute analysis of thought and feeling, is not a little singular, and bespeaks the fatal defect in the man's structure. In the “Tell-tale Heart,” in “Lenore,” in “William Wilson,” and in “The Raven,” there is something of a maniacal remorse, flinging a lurid light over the past; but it is a selfish, fiendish sort of sentiment, and not necessarily, or indeed naturally, connected with any sensibility to moral fitness. A man totally without that sensibility would (probably) be an idiot, but Poe's stock must have been uncommonly small, judging à priori from his writings, and without the least reference to his reckless and almost incredible career — a career which makes him out to have been, we think, the most unmitigated beast known to modern civilisation. It is in vain that, in his case, we try to obey the time-honoured de mortuis nil nisi bonum; all that is known of this being's character is nil nisi detestable, and it is useless trying to mince the matter. The very best thing that is to be said in his favour is, that he was free from any tendency to active cruelty.

We have to add that, in reading what Edgar Poe has left us, we naturally exclaim, not only that we have found a man who had no conscience, or little, but that we have found a man who had no affection, or little. This, it may be, will be denied to us. It is, however, our very painful, but most deliberate conviction, that this wretched creature had just sufficient capacity of attachment in him to qualify him for human intercourse, and hardly a fraction more. Do not tell us that his broken-hearted, murdered wife loved him; do not tell us that her mother tended him, begged for him, lived for him; — alas! alas! and thank the good God! — all in a breath; — we know what women can love, and what they will do for the loved, — from Desdemona's dying lie down to yesterday's police-report, — we remember it all too well to heed that argument. But there is an argument that we would heed: — Here is an author who has written of men and women and human things, most powerfully, most dexterously, most scrutinisingly; he has thrilled us with fear, wonder, mystery, and horror; he has dealt with broken hearts (oh, how coldly!) of husbands (see the “Oblong Box’); of lovers (see “Lenore”); of brothers (see “Fall of the House of Usher”); with mysterious relationships and griefs, alike nameless (see “Morella”); he has analysed every moment of long hours of mental torture (see “The Pit and The Pendulum,” and the “Descent into the Maelström”) — this he has done, we say, with surpassing skill and power. But show us, if you can, the page of Edgar Poe's on which has fallen one blessed tear — one gentle, gentle drop, warm from a melted heart! That tear is the “sacred treasure” for which we should covet the “chemist's magic art,” that it might be “crystallised,” and given to us as an argument for Poe's having had a heart that was [page 36:] a trifle more than a blood-pumping machine; which is what we cannot at present think of the man who wrote “The Cask of Amartillado [[Amontillado]].” But we need not specify; it is everywhere the same, with Poe: immense effect, and conspicuous hollow-heartedness. It is not natural — it rings false — for a man to talk of being

“Father, I have sinned!” or any such simple language, bespeaks genuine repentance; but who believes in a sorrowing for the past which rhymes about

It is too evident in Poe's verses that the rhyme leads the sentiment, and the dancing refrain makes matters worse; of which a curious instance may be found in that strange, mysterious poem “Ulalume;” one of the most powerful of his productions. The name “Ulalume” was never thought of by Poe, we suspect, till he found it would rhyme with “tomb,” just when he wanted it: —

And surely the verge of extremest bathos is, approached in such jungling as this: —

We cry with good Sir Hugh, “Why, te tevil and his tam! This is affectations!” We weep over “Mary in Heaven” — or have done so before now — but here is a really wonderful poem,* of most dramatic structure, and with a wild power about it, but that will not, we think, moisten your eyes, or occasion you incipient hysterica passio, as Lear calls that “climbing sorrow” which is familiar to us all.

LENORE.

This is indeed an extraordinary poem, but alas! it lacks heart. And so did poor Poe. One other thing he lacked, we think, and with this At the end of our path, a liquescent remark we leave him for the present — he wanted humour. The writer who could deliberately put down such a fancy name as Allamistakeo (see “Some Words with a Mummy”) was deficient in an important class of perceptions. The grotesque he could manage very well, as in ‘Never bet the devil your head.” Sometimes, too, he could perpetrate nonsense, — when he didn’t mean it. Ecce signum: —

“EULALIE.

What a “stagnant tide”? may be, you will no doubt wonder, — assisting your inquiries by humming the above to ‘ The Return of the Admiral,” — a favourite tune, by the way, of Mr. Albert Smith, if one may judge by the frequency with which he has written words to it.

Let us refresh ourselves by turning to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who is, or was recently, the American Consul at Liverpool, and who has a warm corner in English hearts wherever he is or may be. Many happy new years to Nathaniel Hawthorne! Immeasurably Poe's inferior in analytical talent, but as much his superior in [page 37:] insight; with less constructive tact and command of words, but with an intenser ideality; no delver into day-dreading horrors, but a lover and reproducer of sunshine and all genial things; sweetly human in his sympathies, reverencing women and children, full of highest aspiration, — Hawthorne does not rank so high among men of genius, as Poe among men of talent, — but a man of genius he is, if words mean anything. He is a prose-poet, a little too prone to “metaphysical conceits.” A phrenologist would say, he is Emerson over again, with a keener eye for (not simple existences, but) incident; to speak “by the card” (‘price 1s., post free, with symbolical drawings” — vide Times), with a larger bump of Eventuality. There are passages in Emerson — e.g. in the surpassing Essays on Love and on Friendship — which might very well have been written by Hawthorne; and if the sage of Concord had sat down to write a short story, he would surely have produced Hawthorne's “Artist of the Beautiful.” Mr. Hawthorne's writings belong, most distinctly, to the nineteenth century; no other age than our own could have produced them, and in some of them the vague suggestions arising from topics of the day are too firmly woven into the texture of the story for the author's acceptance with the majority of readers. People who laugh or shake their heads at all that is comprehended in common talk under the ignoble word Mesmerism — and they are the immense majority — do not find their account, cither of pleasure or profit, in a large portion of the “House of the Seven Gables.” The year 3000 may find the “Blithedale Romance” an instructive as well as interesting record of humanity in its go-cart, feeling its little way; but the number is very small of the readers of to-day, who care for the memorial of a social experiment woven into a romance. We doubt whether the book is to be found at one in fifty of our circulating libraries, — which is, of course, no reproach to a writer who does not wield the pen for circulating library readers, or care for making his volume the book of a season. Mr. Hawthorne “fishes with a heavy sinker.”

The two stories by which Mr. Hawthorne is best known are, “The House of Seven Gables” and the “Scarlet Letter” — the second being the greater favourite with general readers, partly because there is more unity, with less remoteness of design, in the story; and partly because it contains more pathos, while what some one has called “metaphysical conceits” are fewer; but it cannot be doubted that the mysteriously-sounding title has led thousands to open the book, saying, “What can the Scarlet Letter be?” who would not feel attracted towards a tale about a House with Gables, even though their number should be the immemoriably sacred Seven. There is also a mystic horror in the — which appeals strongly to general sensibilities.

To ourselves, the “Scarlet Letter” has always [column 2:] been rather a painful book. Nothing is more unsatisfactory than to be taken by your author into a labyrinth of moral horrors, and left there when he leaves the narrative. Two human beings, of opposite sex, placed in a false position — a position whose moral encompassment would not, we suspect, be clear to a hair-splitting analyst like Mr. Emerson; the demoniacal pursuit of his revenge by the wronged man, whom you so thoroughly hate that it is hard to say whether you pity him; the repentance of the sinning pair, and an expiation which does not satisfy the moral sense; a moral which is not easily translatable into action; — these do not make up a book which you can take to your bosom and love; no, nor a book from which you may draw — what it was, doubtless, intended to convey — a thoroughly wholesome dnd enduring influence for good. Did Mr. Hawthorne mean the ‘Flood of Sunshine” to be the oftenest read, and best-remembered chapter in the book?

The never-to-be-forgotten Custom-house chapter which introduces the “Scarlet Letter’ to the reader, is too full of genial and beautiful touches to allow us to say the volume is a gloomy one; and were that not so, even on reading this, melancholy and bewildering story, one has to say, with Jacob Bœhme, that there is a great sea of light overspreading and stretching beyond the darkness — but then, the clouds hang so low and so heavily that one has to strain his eyes a good deal to realise the glory above and around! And what can we make of this moral, selected by Mr. Hawthorne from many suggested by Arthur Dimmesdale's experience? “Be true! Be true! Be true! ‘Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!” Try to reduce this rule to practice, and you will be puzzled — unless it merely means, — shun hypocrisy; but the last clause is intended to mean something else, and we reject it for vagueness. In daily life, people think both better and worse of us than we deserve; they give us credit where it is not our right, and withhold it where it is due; they both praise and blame in the dark; the general estimate taken of us is probably right by compensation of errors, — like the fiddler's performance, his strings and his fingers being both a little out together. A natural course of conduct can scarcely involve guilty deception, and what remains to be said is not clear. We have no desire that Jones or Brown should show “freely” to ourselves anything by which his “worst may be inferred.” We, probably, know all about it, without his taking the pains; but if he can keep it to himself, he is as welcome, for us, to hide a moral as a physical deformity. What may have been Arthur Dimmesdale's duty is another question.

“We would gladly,” says Mr. Hawthorne, “now that the portent has done its office, erase the print of the Scarlet Letter out of our own brain, where long meditation has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.” Intensity, concentration, is a strong characteristic of Mr. Hawthorne's stories, which consist of a series of pictures, painted with a minuteness of touch sometimes reminding you of the Dutch pencil, and always leaving separate, vivid impressions upon the imagination. He has plenty of humour in him — though he does not succeed. when he sits down to write a professedly humorous sketch; [column 2:] as witness Mrs. Bullfrog. His is humour of that quiet sort which provokes a smile to brighten you up for four-and-twenty hours; always ‘mingled with touches of poetry and glances of delicate insight; yielding you that kind of “amusement”’ which you would not be afraid of in the after-passages of some great grief when you were just beginning to wonder whether you could ever smile again. Leigh Hunt, at his best, never wrote a sweeter paper than that upon “Fire-worship.” For the most part, indeed, Mr. Hawthorne is a thoroughly wholesome writer; in his pathos, “Alps on Alps” superior to your common-place

in his humour, above persiflage and idle funniment. Did ever human spirit smile a tenderer smile than Mr. Hawthorne's, we wonder, when ‘he wrote of the “maiden newly won” to piety, ‘within the stainless sanctity of whose heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity;” how Mr. Dimmesdale met her, and feeling a fiendish impulse to “drop into her tender bosom” some dark suggestion of evil, passed her, without recognition, drawing his Geneva cloak over his face; and how the “young sister, left to digest his rudeness as best she might, ransacked her conscience — which was full of harmless little matters, like her pocket or her workbag, and took herself to task, poor thing! for a thousand imaginary faults; and went about her household duties, with swollen eyelids the next morning”? Poor little girl! you say, but how like all ladies, with their ministers! Uncle Venner's triumphant self-discovery, too, is another short, delightful bit of quietest, sunniest humour: —

“Dear me!” cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realise what manner of man he was. ‘And yet, folks used to set me down among the simple ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I’m like a Roxbury russet — a great deal better the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of wisdom, that you and Phœbe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions, which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among the withered grass, sometimes as late as December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if there were twice as many!”

We are tempted to write that Mr. Hawthorne is the most pure-minded of story-tellers, absolutely the most free from all taint of grossness. Let him tell you about Phœbe, of Clifford noting “the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal development of her bosom, — all her little womanly ways budding out of her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree,” and you are only imparadised. But Eugéne Sue could not have written so minutely about a sweet girl, without making you feel the difference between a prose-poet and a prosing sensualist. Once more, let us read of [page 39:] dear Phœbe, how “In her aspect there was a familiar gladness and a holiness, that you. could play with, and yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phœbe, moreover, and airy and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing that she wore, — neither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little ‘kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings, — had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rosebuds.” And if this is not sufficient, let us accompany our author upon that perilous expedition of his into this young maiden's bed-chamber. Open the door softly, and unbonnet yourself, for this is holy ground: —

This is very sweet writing, and its taintless delicacy reminds us of the shower-bath scene in “Lady Lee's Widowhood.” It is not an easy thing to take a lady (Captain Hamley takes two) into a shower-bath, to draw the curtains, to [column 2:] pull the string, and send one out “pink and palpitating,” and the other “erect and cool,” without sending the thoughts into a single enclosed track; but Captain Hamley has done it to a nicety, and that single scene is, to our thinking, worth the whole cost of the book, — if we may use such a hackneyed reviewer's phrase.

We are almost ashamed to recollect, and quite too ashamed to mention, how many times over we have read the above-quoted passages concerning Phœbe's bedroom, and the following equally beautiful love scene: —

We trust we have some perception, such as Mr. Hawthorne would recognise, of Love as the. grand beautifier and reconciler, but we cannot allow him to go uncontradicted when he says, through Holgrave, that “the world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease,” and so on. Lord Bacon, in his “Essay of Married and Single Life,” falls short of the truth upon this subject; Mr. Hawthorne, we think, oversteps it. Nor will it do to say that existence is always a blank without sexual attachment; there are very earnest and delicate natures who lead most real and beautiful lives, without “love” in the restricted sense, and, we believe, without feeling any “aching void.”

But a truce to fault-finding. We dare say you will be amused, like ourselves, to notice a similarity between a passage in the book we are talking about, and another in Tennyson's “Sleeping Palace.’ Mr. Hawthorne is describing an Italian-boy with his organ and automata: —

Mr. Tennyson is narrating the arrival of the fairy prince: —

Magnificently written, is it not? Mr. Hawthorne's passage about the Italian-boy loses much by being taken out of its connection, to which we refer you.

No attentive reader of Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially no reader of the “Mosses from an Old Manse,” can fail to discern that there is always, or nearly always, a typical meaning running through Mr. Hawthorne's _ stories. Notable instances are to be found in the “Birth-Mark,” and the “Artist of the Beautiful.” In the former, there are features which point to the “Scarlet Letter;” in the latter, to the “House of Seven Gables;” the former sends us [column 2:] to the chapter in “Zanoni,” in which Glyndon dares THE MYSTERY; the latter, to Emerson's “Essay on Art.” Of various typical meanings capable of being given to the “House of Seven Gables,” we give that which occurred to us ‘first, and which seems best supported by a reference to the “Mosses.” It is eminently a nineteenth century story. All the way through, Law and Convention are presented as blind, stupid powers, siding with the strong, when strength is most unjust. The Pyncheon of olden times is surely the type of Might, wicked Might, grasping the heritage of Industry in the name of Religion, while the law hallows the wrong, and creates a nominally “just” right for the “owner” of things originally acquired by rapine and murder. The Maule family stands for Labour and Invention robbed of their birthright, and biding their time. Hepziball for Aristocracy, become, as now, old-womanish, and driven, in days of “unrestricted competition,” when the cotton-lord may buy up the land-lord, to ally itself with the very Industry which, in olden days, it contemned. Alice, with her posies and her harpsichord, represents ‘the shadowy grace and beauty which — things that have “hoar antiquity” and prescription in their favour. Clifford is the wo ‘of the Gentle and Beautiful, pushed aside or trodden upon by rampant Material Success, whose type is the “Pyncheon of to-day.” Young Holgrave is the old, wronged Industry, backed by science and stirred by daring speculation, now coming forward, in fresh guise and fashion, to claim its own. Uncle Venner is extremest Poverty, pauperism, dignified in our eyes by contributing its own peculiar lessons of wisdom: ‘You are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions!” Phœbe is — Phœbe, and ‘has such a corner in our hearts that we do not like to make anything else of her, least of all an abstraction. But surely this pretty creation of Mr. Hawthorne's must stand for the Middle Classes of Society, to whom has been committed by Providence the mission of social reconciliation; which, once completed, the disunited are joined, the unblest, blest, and the ‘wild reformer ‘’ becomes a Conservative after Heaven's own fashion. Moan no longer, old harpsichord! Home to thy rest, grieved Shade! Cease thy prophecies, O whispering elm, and break into murmurous thanksgivings!

Turning a farewell thought to the humanity, purpose, and purity of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings, our minds revert insensibly to poor, unhappy Edgar Allan Poe. Ah! we cry, what a burden of grief and shame lies in

Far from all remembrance of Mr. Hawthorne be any thought of such a sacrilege. Let him say, for himself, how high he has set his mark, how dearly he estimates his vocation: —

Ah, Brother! You have found the “great secret.”

“Sur les mondes detruits, le Temps dort immobile!” but the God- possessed soul rests in the everlasting Yea, and its uttered thought lives for ever!

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 34, column 1:]

*Our readers will remember, with amusement, the handling of this gentleman by the critic in Blackwood who reviewed Mrs, Stowe's “Sunny Memories.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 34, column 2:]

*It is current talk in literary circles, that this production (which has provoked as many parodies as anything ever written, with the exception of Wolfe's “Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna”) is a paraphrase from the Persian. It was Mr. “Mofussilite” Lang, who hearing it repeated by a literary friend, is said to have looked up from his book with “Hallo! that's very good Persian!” instantly quoting the original. Poe was a good Persian scholar.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 36, column 1:]

*We have mislaid our volumes of Poe's works, and are quoting him entirely from memory; which we mention by way of apology for any slight verbal error which a better recollection than our own may detect.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 36, column 2:]

† Sic in orig. — “feeble” as it is!

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 38, column 1:]

*The italics are ours, — once for all, Mr. Hawthorne never, to our knowledge, employs them.