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Partly, of course, this was a matter of mere personal appearance. His firm old features, encircled by a cloud of snowy hair and beard, would have impressed anybody; but in the distinction of Bryant's appearance there was something more than accident of feature, and something far more significant in the history of literary America. One does not remember his manner as in the least assertive. Rather to those who, without knowing him, saw him at a distance his aspect was gentle, kindly, calmly venerable. But it had not the simplicity of unconsciousness. Whatever he really felt, he looked like a man who felt himself considerable; and certainly the qualities for which he most valued himself were not those which as journalist and man of business had made him a man of fortune. The thing for which he most respected himself was his work as a poet; and beyond question it was his work as a poet which the public most willingly recognised. The distinction he may have felt, -the distinction which he certainly received from his contemporaries, and which came to be so embodied in his personal appearance, was wholly due to his achievement as a

man of letters.

In this fact there is something characteristic of America at the time when Bryant's best work was done. Ours was a new country, at last conscious of its national independence. It was deeply and sensitively aware that it lacked a literature. Whoever produced writings which could be pronounced admirable was accordingly regarded by his fellow-citizens as a public benefactor, a great public figure, a personage of whom the nation should be proud. Bryant, fully recognised in early middle life, retained to the end that gracious distinction of aspect which comes from the habit of personal

eminence.

Such was the eldest of our nineteenth-century poets, the first whose work was recognised abroad. In the nature of things he has never been widely popular; and in the course

of a century whose poetry has been chiefly marked by romantic passion, he has tended to seem more and more commonplace. But those of us who used to think him commonplace forgot his historical significance; we forgot that his work was really the first which proved to England what native American poetry might be. The old world was looking for some wild manifestation of this new, hardly apprehended, western democracy. Instead, what it found in Bryant, the one poetic contemporary of Irving and Cooper whose writings have lasted, was fastidious over-refinement, tender sentimentality, and pervasive luminosity. Refinement, in short, and conscious refinement, groups Bryant with Irving, with Cooper, and with Brockden Brown. In its beginning the American literature of the nineteenth century was marked rather by delicacy than by strength, by palpable consciousness of personal distinction rather than by any such outburst of previously unphrased emotion as on general principles democracy might have been expected to excite.

V

EDGAR ALLAN POE

IN April, 1846, Edgar Allan Poe published in "Godey's Lady's Book" a considerable article on William Cullen Bryant. In the six following numbers of the same periodical, whose colored fashion-plates are said to have been highly acceptable to the contemporary female public, appeared that series of comments on the literary personages of the day which has been collected under the name of the "Literati." The personal career of Poe was so erratic that one can hardly group him with any definite literary school. It seems, however, more than accidental that his principal critical work concerned the contemporary literature of New York; and though he was born in Boston and passed a good deal of his life in Virginia, he spent in New York rather more of his literary years than anywhere else. On the whole, then, this seems the most fitting place to consider him.

Erratic his career was from the beginning. His father, the son of a Revolutionary soldier, had gone wrong and brought up on the stage; his mother was an English actress of whom little is known. The pair, who chanced to be in Boston when their son was born, in 1809, died when he was still a little child. At the age of two, he was adopted by a gentleman of Richmond, Virginia, named Allan, who soon took him to Europe, where he remained from 1815 to 1820. In 1826 he was for a year at the University of Virginia, where his career was brought to an end by a gambling scrape, which in turn brought almost to an end his relations with his adopted father. In 1827 his first verses were published,

a little volume entitled "Tamerlane and Other Poems." Then he drifted into the army, and a temporary reconciliation with Mr. Allan got him into the Military Academy at West Point, from which in 1831 he managed to get himself dismissed. After that he always lived from hand to mouth, supporting himself as a journalist and as a contributor to numberless periodicals which flourished in his day and have long since disappeared. The unedifying question of his personal habits need not seriously concern us. Beyond doubt he was occasionally drunk, and he probably took more or less opium; at the same time there is no evidence that he was abandoned to habitual excesses. His "Manuscript found in a Bottle," published in 1833, procured him for a while the editorship of the "Southern Literary Messenger," published at Richmond and for many years the most successful literary periodical of the South. In 1835 he secretly married a charming but penniless girl, a relative of his own; he married her again openly in 1836. In 1839 and 1840 he edited the "Gentleman's Magazine" in Philadelphia; from 1840 to 1842 he edited "Graham's Magazine" in New York; his general career was that of a literary hack. In 1847, after a life of distressing poverty, his wife died; two years later Poe himself died under circumstances which have never been quite clear. He had certainly alleviated his widowhood by various flirtations, and it is said that he was about to marry again. The story goes that he was passing through Baltimore, either on his way to see his betrothed or on his way from a visit to her. In that city an election was about to take place; and some petty politicians in search of "repeaters" picked him up, got him drunk, and made him vote all over town. Having thus exhausted his political usefulness, they left him in the gutter from whence he found his way to the hospital, where he certainly died.

Born fifteen years later than Bryant and dead twenty-nine years earlier, Poe, now fifty years in his grave, seems to

belong to an earlier period of our letters; but really, as we have seen, Bryant's principal work was done before 1832. At that time Poe had published only three volumes of verse; his lasting prose came somewhat later; in fact, the permanent work of Poe may be said to coincide with the first twelve years of the Victorian epoch. In 1838, the year of "Arthur Gordon Pym," Dickens was at work on "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby;" and Carlyle's "French Revolution" was a new book. In 1849, when Poe died, Thackeray's

Vanity Fair" and the first two volumes of Macaulay's "History" had lately appeared; Dickens was publishing "David Copperfield," and Thackeray "Pendennis;" and Ruskin brought out his "Seven Lamps of Architecture." Had Poe survived to Bryant's years, he would have outlived not only Bryant himself, but Emerson and Hawthorne and Longfellow and Lowell, and indeed almost every literary contemporary except Holmes.

The very mention of these names is enough to call to mind a distinction between the career of Poe and that of almost every other American whose literary reputation has survived from the days when he was writing. The men on whom we have already touched were socially of the better sort, either by birth or by achieved position. So in general were the chief men of letters who made the Renaissance of New England the most important fact in American literary history. Poe, on the other hand, was always a waif and a stray, essentially a Bohemian. There was in his nature something which made futile the effort of that benevolent Virginian gentleman to adopt him into the gentler social classes of America. In his lifetime, then, Poe must have seemed personally inferior to most of his eminent contemporaries in American letters. Yet now that all are dead, he begins to seem quite as important as any. In 1885 Mr. William Minto, writing of him in the Encyclopedia Britannica," called him "the most interesting figure in American literature." Superlatives, of course, are

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