Shakspere's serious work was beginning. Between Poe's work and Marlowe's there is another analogy which has historically proved more characteristic of literature in America than in England. Marlowe's life, like Poe's, was ugly, sinful, and sordid; yet hardly a line of Marlowe's tragedies is morally corrupt. For this, indeed, there was good reason. Marlowe chanced to belong to the period when English literature was first springing into conscious life, with all the force of unhampered imaginative vitality. In literature, as in human existence, a chief grace of normal youth is freedom from such baseness as time must make familiar to maturity. In the case of Poe a similar contrast between life and work appears. Here, however, this normal reason for it did not exist. The very fact that Poe's work has been eagerly welcomed by continental Europe is evidence enough, if one needed evidence, that his temper was such as the cant of the present day calls decadent. Now the decadent literature which has prevailed in recent England, and far more that which has prevailed elsewhere in Europe, is pruriently foul, obscenely alive with nameless figures and incidents, and with germ-like suggestions of such decay as must permeate a civilisation past its prime. In Poe's work, on the other hand, for all the decadent quality of his temper, there is a singular cleanness, something which for all the thousand errors of his personal life seems like the instinctive purity of a child. He is not only free from any taint of indecency; he seems remote from fleshliness of mental habit. In the strenuousness of his artistic conscience we found a trait more characteristic of America than of England, — a trait which is perhaps involved in the national self-consciousness. of our country. In this instinctive freedom from lubricity, so strongly in contrast with the circumstances of his personal career, and yet to all appearances so unaffected, one feels a touch still more characteristic of his America. It is allied, perhaps, with that freedom from actuality which we have seen to characterise his most apparently vivid work. The world which bred Poe was still a world to whose national life we may give the name of inexperience. Intensely individual, then, and paradoxically sincere in all his histrionic malady of temper, Poe set forth a peculiar range of mysterious though not significant emotion. In the fact that this emotion, even though insignificant, was mysterious, is a trait which we begin to recognise as characteristically American, at least at that moment when American life meant something else than profound human experience. There is something characteristically American, too, in the fact that Poe's work gains its effect from artistic conscience, an ever present sense of form. Finally, there is something characteristically American in Poe's freedom from either conventional or real fleshly taint. Though Poe's power was great, however, his chief merits prove merits of refinement. Even through a time so recent as his, refinement of temper, conscientious sense of form, and instinctive neglect of actual fact remained the most characteristic traits, if not of American life, at least of American letters. VI THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL In the course of our glances at Poe we had occasion to recog、 nise the existence of an extensive, though now forgotten, periodical literature," Godey's Lady's Books," "Southern Literary Messengers," "Graham's Magazines," and the like, which carried on the impulse toward periodical publication already evident in the time of Brockden Brown. Throughout the older regions of America such things sprung up, flourished for a little while, and withered, in weed-like profusion. A year or two ago, Dr. W. B. Cairns, of the University of Wisconsin, published an admirable pamphlet, "On the Development of American Literature from 1815 to 1833," in which this ephemeral phase of it is thoroughly set forth. So far as the periodicals were literary, they were intensely conventional and sentimental, often in the manner of which Mrs. Rowson's once popular novel, "Charlotte Temple," may be taken as a comically extravagant example. In brief, as Dr. Cairns displays them, they are another proof, if proof were needed, of what inevitable luxuriance of insignificant waste must accompany any period of artistic achievement, even when the achievement itself is so far from amazing as was that of America during the years now in question. In 1833, the year when Dr. Cairns brings his study to a close, there was founded in New York the magazine in which this phase of literary activity may be said to have culminated. This "Knickerbocker Magazine," then, deserves more attention than its positive merit would warrant. It was founded the year after Bryant brought out the first consider able collection of his poems, that 1832 which was marked in English history by the Reform Bill and in English literature by the death of Scott. The chief founder of the "Knickerbocker Magazine" is said to have been Charles Fenno Hoffman, a gentleman of New York whom Poe recorded among the Literati of 1846, who published a number of novels and poems, and whose career sadly closed with an insanity which, beginning in 1849, kept him for a full thirty-five years in the seclusion where he died. During its thirty years or so of existence the "Knickerbocker Magazine became not only the most conspicuous, but also the oldest periodical of its class in the United States. Though Poe's Literati were not all contributors to it, their names fairly typify the general character of its staff, toward the end of the 40's. In 1854 its editor was a gentleman named Lewis Gaylord Clark, whose actual contributions to literature were not important enough to have been found worthy of a place in Stedman and Hutchinson's generously comprehensive "Library." He had a slightly more eminent twin-brother, Willis Gaylord Clark, who died young; Stedman and Hutchinson print one of the latter's poems, “A Witch Song," of which masterpiece of the Clark genius the following stanza may give an adequate "Our boat is strong, its oars are good, Of charnel bones its ribs are made; It is a felon's blood-shot e'e, And it shineth forth from his skeleton brow As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the magazine was approaching, somebody proposed that "the surviving writers for the Knickerbocker' should each furnish, gratuitously, an article, and that the collection should be published in a volume of tasteful elegance, of which the entire proceeds should be devoted to the building, on the margin of the Hudson, of a cottage, suitable for the home of a man of letters, who, like Mr. Clark, is also a lover of rural life." The book, which is entitled the "Knickerbocker Gallery," was published early in 1855. In general aspect it is a rather comical relic of obsolete taste. It is a fat volume of about five hundred gilt-edged pages, bound in some imitation of morocco, heavily overlaid with gilt roses and conventional designs. In the middle of the cover is a rough image of the proposed Knickerbocker cottage, a pseudo-Gothic structure with a regular American piazza, almost heraldically supported on either side by a small tree, one apparently a pine, the other perhaps a maple, and neither quite reaching to the second-story windows. The interior of the book corresponds with its inviting external aspect. There are fifty-five contributions by fifty-four separate men of letters. For some reason which does not appear, no women seem to have been invited to co-operate in the benevolent scheme. In general, the contributions are such as pervaded the sentimental annuals and gift-books which during the second quarter of the nineteenth century delighted the reading public in England and in America alike. Forty-seven of the articles are enriched by portraits of the writers engraved on steel. The most characteristic of these is perhaps a gently smirking vignette of Bryant, whose chin beard, shaven upper lip, and poetically bald forehead, dividing unkempt locks, emerge from the broad velvet collar of a much befrogged dressing-gown. Among the faces thus immortalised was that of Irving, whose portrait is taken not from a daguerreotype, but from a togaed bust by Ball Hughes. He contributed some notes from a commonplace book of the year 1821. Bryant sent some verses on "A Snow Shower;" and Halleck a poetical "Epistle to Clark." There are also contributions from several duly portrayed literary men of New England: Holmes sent a |