surrounded by her children, asks your assistance, and asks it perhaps for the last time," was not made in vain; but not even Southern generosity could prolong the life of a fragile and overburdened woman, and Mrs. Poe died a few days later. Of Mr. Poe nothing is known subsequent to the death of his wife. The three children were scattered; Edgar being fortunate enough to awaken the interest of Mrs. John Allan, the young wife of a well-to-do business man in Richmond.

The conditions of the boy's life were changed as by magic; he became a member of a family living in easy and comfortable ways; he was tenderly cared for and greatly admired. The fascination of his personality was already making itself felt, and his mobile and sensitive face, his luminous eyes, and his talent for declamation brought a foretaste of that applause of which he was avid by nature. Mr. Allan had not only the Scotch thrift, but the Scotch regard for education; and the child of his adoption, now become Edgar Allan Poe, had the best opportunities of his time. He went to school in Richmond for several years; a fastidiously dressed child, fond of his pony and his dogs, and easily attracting the attention and awakening the interest of many people outside his own home, in which he had all the honors of an only child. In 1815 Mr. Allan took his family to England, and Edgar entered the Manor House School, on the outskirts of London.

In this secluded English village, with its long, shaded street, the boy spent five of the most impressionable years of his life, and the surroundings and experiences of this period left an ineffaceable impress upon his imagination. The school was lodged in an old, spacious, irregular structure; the school-room was low, ceiled with oak, and lighted by Gothic windows; its desks bore the marks of generations of jackknives; the playground was wide and open to the sun; a high brick wall, with great gates studded with spikes of a size to daunt the most venturesome boy, inclosed the grounds; and beyond lay the sweet English landscape of green lanes, softly rolling fields, great trees with the memories of forgotten centuries still murmuring in their branches; and behind the visible landscape was that other landscape which is always unfolding itself to the

imagination in that ripe old world. neighborhood was rich in the most romantic history. The names of its walks recalled Henry and Elizabeth; Anne Boleyn and the Earl of Leicester had lived there; Essex had found his home there; and there, too, was one of the original homes of English literature, for there De Foe had written the earliest story of adventure and the earliest piece of perfectly developed fiction in the language.

The English landscape with which he became familiar never faded, and reappeared, especially in its architectural features, again and again in his stories. The mellow atmosphere, the gnarled and mossy trees, the half-ruined house, the rich verdure of meadow and lane, were easily touched with an overripe and melancholy beauty, akin to the loneliness of desolate spirits and solitary experiences, by the active imagination of a later period.

The Allans returned to Richmond in 1820, and Edgar became the pupil of a solemn and pedantic Irishman, read the classics, made Latin verses, and gained greater ease in French. He had already begun to write verses, but his schoolfellows knew him as a brilliant student, irregular and desultory in his work, but doing with ease whatever he undertook; lacking in accuracy and thoroughness, but quick and versatile; fond of reading; satirical in temper; slight in figure, but well made, sinewy, active, and graceful; a daring swimmer; scrupulously neat in dress and noticeably courteous in manner. He had winning qualities, but he was not popular with his fellows. The fact that he was the child of strolling players was not forgotten by them nor by himself; through all the luxury which surrounded him, it remained a painful reminder of other and less fortunate conditions. He was proud, solitary, and the slight chill of disapproval in the air about him evoked a defiant spirit. One who was on terms approaching intimacy with him described him as "self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and, though of generous impulses, not steadily kind or even amiable." There was something in his nature, then and later, which held him back from complete confidence in men; he had warm friends among men, and at least two women were devoted to him; but the frank and generous free

dom, the wholesome interchange of confidence between man and man, he seems never to have known. There was a touch of unreality in his life, as there was, later, in his art; he was not only a dreamer, as some of the sanest men have been, but he never quite clearly discovered and accepted the distance between the actual and the imaginary. One never feels entirely at home with him; not because such unusual tracts of experience are open to him, but because there is an elusive element in him-a lack of large, deep, rich

humanity beneath his talent. This element of unreality made solid friendship quite impossible; and it limited his art in certain respects quite as distinctly as it limited his character.

While he was in this critical stage of adolescence, Poe lost a friend who might have been a steadying influence in the perilous years before him; a lovely, gen erous, and gracious woman, whose first sympathetic words to him thrilled his heart and evoked a passionate devotion. Mrs. Stanard was the mother of one of his

mates, and had, therefore, ready access to his confidence; she became his confidante, and he lavished upon her the affection which he would have given his mother. But within a few months she died, and the boy, who had found warmth and light in her comprehending affection, was almost prostrated by grief. He haunted her grave, and, in the passionate melancholy which possessed him, became aware of the tragic resources of a temperament singularly accessible to misfortune and singularly sensitive to the mystery of grief and despair- temperament which seemed to assimilate the latent sadness of life, and to respond to the experiences of the outcast and despairing souls in a speech, both in prose and verse, which magically gave back their most elusive tones.

In 1825 Poe entered the University of Virginia, which in that year opened its doors to students and began its influential career; an institution then, and still, in many respects, unique in the academic world. He was in his seventeenth year, compactly built, somewhat short in stature, his face touched with sadness, but readily becoming animated. He entered the schools of ancient and modern languages, studied Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian, after a desultory fashion; played cards for stakes, and showed that taste for strong drink which later made his career a tragedy. At this period gambling rather than excessive drinking was his undoing. Becoming involved in debt, he had to invoke the aid of Mr. Allan, who paid his debts in Charlottesville, but refused to make good his losses at play, amounting to the very respectable sum of twenty-five hundred dollars. Poe remained at the University until the close of the session, and returned home with honors in Latin and French to find that his future was to be in Mr. Allan's counting-room. His irregularities had cost him his educational opportunities.

He took his place in Mr. Allan's counting-room only to disappear and begin the unsettled, roving career which never again found permanent lodgment or shelter. He next appears in Boston, where he made his first venture in the field to which his tastes and his genius were steadily and with increasing insistence drawing him. "Tamerlane and Other Poems" was the venture of an amateur publisher, but it had

some success. It revealed the sensibility of a poetic nature rather than poetic power; it was full of traces of imitation, and its chief interest lies in the light which it throws on Poe's mind and growth. Byron was in the full tide of his immense influence upon young men of imaginative temper, and Poe did not escape a fever which was not only highly contagious, but, in the case of all weak victims, fatal to original and natural development. Byron's colossal pride found a quick soil in Poe's nature, and confirmed his tendency to idealize pride as a heroic quality.

But a slender volume of verse was a very fragile reed to lean upon, and, by way of cutting the Gordian knot with a sword, in 1827 Poe enlisted in the United States army as a private soldier, under the name of Edgar A. Perry. After a service of two years, in which he appears to have done his work with entire fidelity and noticeable efficiency, he was discharged, largely through the kindly offices of Mr. Allan, with whom he had effected a reconciliation. About this time he wrote: "I am young-not yet twenty; am a poetif deep worship of all beauty can make me one and wish to be so in the common meaning of the word. I would give the world to embody one-half the ideas afloat in my imagination ;" and, by way of justifying these statements, Al Aaraaf," "Tamerlane," and "Minor Poems ́ were published in Baltimore in 1829. The habit of slightly or radically revising a piece of work which had already appeared, and sending it out in a new form, dates from his second volume, and grew upon him as time went on. "Al Aaraaf" was an obscure allegory, with a brief narrative passage and an abrupt ending; "Tamerlane " showed signs of careful revision, but gained, rather than lost, in imitative quality. In Fairyland" alone among his earliest poems is there a clear and convincing glimpse of Poe's genius.

In the following year Poe is found at West Point; Mr. Allan had married a second time, and had, in his judgment, finally disposed of his difficult ward by securing for him an appointment to the Military Academy. He is described at this period as shy and reserved, associating mainly with cadets from Virginia, a ready French scholar, apt at mathematics, an omnivorous reader of books; but neglectful, and even

contemptuous, of military duties. He paid no regard to the routine of roll-call, drill, and guard duty was often under arrest, and at the end of six months' service was dismissed by court martial, on the charge of absenting himself from various military and academic duties, and of disobeying on two occasions the orders of the officer of the day. In March, 1831, Poe was again free to seek his fortune, and he was again penniless. He had arranged, meantime, for the publication of a new edition of his works, and the volume entitled "Poems" appeared, this time in New York. It was a new edition in name only. From the previously published volume six poems were omitted, several were greatly changed, and six additional pieces were included. With the appearance of these new pieces all doubt about Poe's genius was finally dispelled; for these additional poems were 'Lenore," "The Valley of Unrest," "The City in the Sea," "To Helen," and "Israfel." These poems were to attain perfection by many later touches, but both in conception and in form they disclose all that was original and distinctive in Poe's mind and art. He was already traversing those remote and mysterious worlds, lighted by low moons, haunted by strange tragic figures, with backgrounds of marvelously drawn. landscape, somber, weird, and solitary, with which he was to familiarize his readers both in prose and verse; while his art shows perfect sympathy and understanding between his thought and his skill. He had the magic of style; he was a master of sound if not of language, and more perfectly than any other American poet he knows how to beguile the ear by a melody which is at once simple and mysterious which captivates the instant it is heard, and yet eludes all attempts at successful imitation. There is something hypnotic in the spell of his verse, which gives one an uneasy sense that he is yielding to a charm addressed to his senses rather than to his imagination. In "The Raven" and "The Bells" this hypnotic quality is at its highest, and the higher poetic quality at its lowest; the outer courts of the soul are swept with sound, but the inner court remains silent.

This question about the reality of his art and its entire sincerity has undoubtedly stood in the way, not of its wider, but of

its higher appreciation in this country. But this suspicion of the predominance of a purely sensuous over genuine poetic quality, which finds confirmation in The Raven" and "The Bells," has no place in the consideration of such perfection of sense and sound as the lines "To Helen," "The City in the Sea," and "Israfel." The first of these pieces is so slight in thought that its charm will hardly bear analysis; the second is a piece of description which shows Poe's power of this kind at its best; the third is not only the most tender and beautiful expression of Poe's genius, but in the region of pure song it is one of the finalities in American poetry. In imaginative conception and in form it may even be said to be one of the finalities of modern art. It has the ease, the floating quality, the natural magic, of those rare lyrics which are equally at home in the memory and the heart of the race.

Meantime the poet was barely recognized, was without means of support, had exhausted the patience of Mr. Allan, wasted several opportunities, and was now to face the world at his own charges. He made his next experiment in the art of living in Baltimore, where he had friends, and where there were a number of littérateurs of local importance, and a weekly literary journal. This journal, the "Saturday Visitor," offered a prize of one hundred dollars for the best prose story; and the prize was awarded to "A MS. Found in a Bottle," and the story was published in the autumn of 1833. Poe's fortunes were at so low an ebb that he was declining invitations because he could not dress presentably, and the stimulus of success in a practical form was of immense value to him. He was living with his father's widowed sister, Mrs. Clemm, whose daughter, Virginia, was then eleven years old. The poet had now fairly launched himself on the uncertain tide of literary fortune, had clearly shown his individual quality both in prose and verse, and there was but one more event needed to commit him entirely to his profession, and that event came in 1834, when Mr. Allan died and left him without an inheritance. He was writing stories and criticisms, and he was drinking too often and too freely. His sensitive nervous system, his irregular life, the privation and strain

of constant change and uncertainty, his fitful and melancholy temperament, and the intensity of his imagination, made him. an easy prey to intemperance, and an easily shattered victim. Nothing could have saved him except a strong will; and, unluckily, he belonged to the class whose temperaments command their will. At this time, however, his excesses were infrequent, and there is no doubt of the sincerity of his effort to free himself from a weakness to the perils of which he seems never to have been blind.

The attachment between Poe and his cousin Virginia ripened into love, and became the deepest and noblest passion of his life. The sensitive girl was barely thirteen, but in September, 1835, the marriage took place. Poe had removed to Richmond, was editing the Southern "Literary Messenger," and was writing poems, stories, and reviews with evident ease and delight. In one of these stories Poe brings on the stage the figure in whose temperament and fate he was most deeply interested, and who, under various names, was to reappear again and again in his later tales.

Egæus in "Berenice" belongs to the race of visionaries whose sphere of interest and experience touches the realities of life only at rare intervals, and then solely for the sake of heightening the sense of its difference and remoteness Gloomy towers, gray hereditary halls, a solitary and desolate landscape, subtly suggest to the senses the tragedy of disordered fancy, morbid temperament, diseased will, and abnormal fate which is to be worked out in a series of impressions designed to envelop the reader in an atmosphere of melancholy forebodings. The moment one breathes the air of Poe's tales an oppressive sense of something ominous and sinister is felt. For Poe had the art which Maeterlinck has so successfully practiced, of securing possession of the reader's mind by assailing his senses one after the other with the same set of sensations. Poe's tales, like Maeterlinck's plays, are marvelously constructed to shut the reader in by excluding all other objects and impressions until his imagination is entirely at the mercy of the story-teller.

Egæus has no human warmth or passion; although, like most of Poe's heroes, he is consumed with the desire of posses

sion. Berenice is a veritable phantasm, and never for a moment deceives us by the semblance of reality; her fate is repulsive, for Poe's artistic feeling often failed to keep him in the realm of pure suggestion in dealing with the horrible. In the most perfect of the prose tales, "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia,” "Eleonora," and "The Masque of the Red Death," the full force of Poe's marvelous accuracy and vraisemblance of detail is felt by the imagination; but it must be added that the failure to completely possess the mind of the reader is due to no limitation in Poe's art; it is due to the limitation of his material. He went as far on the road to complete illusion as his subject matter permitted; but his subject matter was so largely made up of the morbid, the abnormal, the phantasmal, that it can never seem other than it was in its substance. In these tales, so full of powerful effects and charms wrought out of the potencies of sin, disease, solitary desolation, abnormal play of the senses, Poe's artistic quality is supreme; in them, as in half a dozen poems, he is one of the modern masters of technique; and their limitations as works of art must be sought not in the skill but in the soul of the workman. That limitation is found in the fact that Poe deals with experience of a very narrow and limited kind; with emotions, passions, and tendencies which are exceptional and abnormal; with landscapes and localities which are essentially phantasmal and unreal, not in the sense of being purely imaginary, but of lying outside the range of imagination creating along lines of normal activity.

In the exact degree in which a writer deals with life in the most inclusive forms of experience does he reveal breadth of view, sanity of insight, and constructive power. These are the characteristics of writers of the first and second rank: of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, and of Cervantes, Molière, Schiller, and Tennyson. And because of this breadth of view and of sympathetic insight, these writers are one and all representative or interprctative artists; they make their art the medium of the disclosure and expression of race experience on a large scale. this representative quality Poe is almost utterly lacking; he was detached in imagination from the world about him. His

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