and after four days of wretchedness, died, being but little past his fortieth year, in what should have been the very prime of his powers, the best of his literary performance.

His tomb is visited to-day by thousands in a little graveyard connected with an old church in that city. The record of such a brief, tragic life is almost too piteous to bear. Literary annals hardly hold a case in which the dramatic contrast of genius and weakness, of high and low, in human achievements, clash with more violent discord.

A final word should be spoken of Poe as a critic of literature, for he left several volumes of criticism. Much of it is journalistic, because of its reference to current writers now forgotten, and it is therefore not of permanent value. But Poe had remarkable analytic gifts, as well as gifts of remarkable expression. He was not less analytic than imaginatively sympathetic, one is tempted to say, in his creative work both in fiction and poetry. There seems a double nature in the man, intellectually as well as morally. Hence certain of his papers entitled "The Rationale of Verse" and "The Poetic Principle," are most interesting and suggestive, especially in that they are the productions of a great poet speaking of the art he represents. His theories are still much discussed. Certain of his statements, like the famous dictum that there is no such thing as a long poem, because the poetic ecstasy is in its very constitution of short duration, and hence, ideally at least, should be completed at one sitting, in one mood, has provoked a great deal of argument. Poe had a high ideal of his craft, and a profound respect for its technic. His teaching, which separated the beauty which he claimed to be the abiding aim of all poetry from any and all didactic purposes, which so often were associated with

H

it, was more needed and wholesome in his own day than our own, because then the elder writers were prone to preach, whereas at present, estheticism and art for art's sake make up the most popular creed, and there is very little danger of careless technic. Yet Poe indubitably enunciated a sound and lasting principle of art in declaring the arousement and exercise of the feeling for beauty to be the end of art, the idea so nobly expressed by Keats, in his

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, this is all
Ye know and all ye need to know.

Like the great English critic, Hazlitt, Poe's literary attainments were curiously commingled of acuteness and broadminded appreciation, together with spite, envy, and an absurd overestimate of the second rate. He was unfair to Longfellow; while, on the other hand, he lauded contemporary poetasters whose names have long since been consigned to oblivion. It was only when he got away from personalities that he was sure to be at his finest.

The student, then, who is desirous of getting a rounded view of Edgar Allan Poe must study him first of all as a poet, next as a remarkable writer of short stories, and then, finally, as supplementary, read his best criticism, mainly for the light it throws upon his own creations in song and story.

CHAPTER V

HAWTHORNE

In thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a man and author, Wordsworth's line on Milton leaps to the mind :

His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.

There is something aloof, a touch of the strange, and shy, and mysterious about the solitary genius of the man of Salem. All latter-day attempts to exhibit him in his personality and daily walk as a creature of warmly human relations do not remove the impression gained from his works and consonant with his acts and thoughts and feelings as they are revealed in his biography. Yet his gifts were masculine; he lacked the erraticism and morbidity of a Poe. But there was a hint of the night in it, the night lit by the pale, mystic radiance of heaven's high-placed stars. The study of his life and writings will serve to make this plainer. Hawthorne was of excellent New England blood. His ancestry went back to the Major William Hawthorne who was prominent in Colonial days as a legislator and warrior. The romancer refers to him in the Preface to "The Scarlet Letter" as his "grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor, who came so early with his Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn streets with such a stately port, and made so large a figure as a man of war and peace." Both father and grandfather were sea cap

tains, an interesting fact for its suggestion of their hereditary influence on his work an influence, however, not easy to discover. Hawthorne in the same Preface says of them: "From father to son for above a hundred years they followed the sea a gray-bearded shipmaster in each generation retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary position before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire," and he goes on with quiet humor to imagine these his forebears as contemptuous over their descendant who had become a writer of story books," exclaiming, "Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" In much the same spirit, humorously satirical, Robert Louis Stevenson refers to himself more than once as a white-fingered, weak offspring of a hardy race of lighthouse builders and keepers.

His mother's family, the Mannings, was also one which had settled in New England in the seventeenth century, so that the New England consciousness (much more a definite thing then than now) was deep in his nature, and by both he was well fitted to become the revealer of the historic New England conscience, working out in the persons of his spiritual tragedies.

Mrs. Hawthorne, Nathaniel's mother, was a quiet widow, whose husband died four years after the son's birth, and who led, during his boyhood and upbringing, a very secluded life. His schooling, provided for by an uncle, was secured at private schools in Salem, the quaint old Massachusetts seaport which was his native place; and later from a tutor who fitted him for college. When he was nine, the Hawthornes removed to Sebago Lake in Maine, where the mother had inherited an estate, and for some years Nathaniel had

the advantage there of a wholesome country life, all of which he greatly enjoyed, being a boy of lively nature, much given to athletic exercises, and fond of sport. He returned, however, to Salem to fit for college, and he has left words to show that he regarded the proposed scholastic training as of dubious good. "Four years of my life is a great deal to throw away," he declares, and the remark has its amusement for us who look back upon him as a great man of letters, all his days a dreamer over books.

When the family resumed their Salem life, the recluse habits of the mother were intensified. Hawthorne himself narrates that for years she never came to the family table for her meals, which were served in her room. A single fact like this gives a vivid picture of the excessive exclusion of her manner of existence. It is not hard to fancy that this would react upon the temperament of a sensitive boy with the brooding tendency in his blood. Yet too much of it must not be made earlier biographers of Hawthorne were so inclined, but the more correct portrait allots to him his full share of playfulness and healthy interests. As his Maine experiences witness, he liked outdoor life, went fishing and shooting, kept animal pets, and SO far from being a forlorn, neglected lad, a kind of David Copperfield was rather petted by the family relatives. He read some of the standard literature in these early days in a rambling, ruminative way : we learn that "The Pilgrim's Progress" was much in his hands, as were Shakespeare and Milton, good fodder for the assimilative period. The school terms were varied by vacationings that kept body and brain in wholesome balance. Altogether, we may see Hawthorne's boyhood as a normal and enjoyable one, whatever the idiosyncrasies of his home.