logy teach us that there is likewise the same amount of life? The world may be more populous now than it was in the centuries immediately succeeding Adam, though the names of the patriarchs are supposed to stand for tribes, but even if they are for individuals, what a developement of strength must there have been in the antediluvian ages, when the vigor of a single human being outlasted a period as long as might be occupied by one who should have been born before the first crusade and have a century yet to live! And in proof that their lives were as comprehensive as ours, we have the mountain-like ruins of their cities; and their maxims, their poetry, and their religion, have come down to us. They were as wise in their generation as we are in ours.

"But in those old, pastoral days, the changes in the combinations of spirit and matter, in humanity, did not take place so rapidly as they do now when the earth is so much more subdued to man's uses. There is now a more violent ebullition, and the streams of bubbles chase each other upward, and change and shift more rapidly. Our bodies are frailer, and we pass through our little cycles subject to infinitely more numerous pertrubing influences. At least, this is true just in these few civilized families, and especially in the new continent of America, to which the nations are crowding.

Yet, even there, the process goes on, similar to growth and decay in vegetable life, by which nothing of the divine breath is lost, but it only enters into new combinations, to re-appear in other forms. No man can live and die in any contact with his species, without all that was peculiar in him having its effect upon, or, so to speak, combining with, his contemporaries and successors; and especially in those callings which bring individuals to be known of great numbers of their fellows, may this be observed.

"Let us," proceeds Von Dencken, "consider the case of authors. Whoever writes a book and publishes it, if he has ability enough to attract readers, will be sure, in the end, to have all that which was real truth in it, with regard to himself, found out and duly weighed. However different his organization may have been from the common one; if even all that was easy to others was to him difficult; how ever much his temper may have been exacerbated by cares that others could not feel, and views they could neither see nor understandin the end, all that was singular in the composition of his spirit will be again received into the ocean of existence through the raindrop tears of joy or grief, or the silent absorption of the soil of kindred minds. The balance of vitality will be maintained.

"And this not through any particular lenience of the world to the faults of genius,'

for no such lenience exists. But the inquiring soul of man will not rest, where it sees aught peculiar, until it has ascertained the whole. And when it sees, for instance, in a single case, that 'here was a delicate and beautiful crystal of a being, which could not have grown into any other shape but this, could not have transmitted to us any but this sombre light,' it will look into itself and observe its own tendencies towards a similar destiny, and will spontaneously endeavor to master them. Thus, what wrought unto death in the original, is in the next taken as a healthful assimilant. All that the original suffered in overcoming, is saved to the next combination, so far as that particular element is concerned. What a centralization of soul-vigor took place in Homer, who could master so well the beauties of thought, speech, and music, as to inform the mind of so many nations, through so many centuries! The fire is immortal, and will never be extinguished by diffusion. So, too, those great English poets, whom I delight to study, Shakspeare and Milton; they were so individual, and so capable to endure so much, both of the good and evil of life, that they have imparted strength to their whole nation, who are never weary of inquiring and thinking of them, and of how the world must have appeared to them. The real part of them, the true vitality of their souls, not the mere bodily power, but that by which they could endure and overcome, knowing, and looking down upon it from an assumed region of thoughtthis was so much more comprehensive and powerful than the same quality in any other writers, that they have exalted the level of life in their whole nation. All intelligent English spirits have some affinity with them.

"Yet, a daily life," continues the philosopher, "even with gentle Will, as they termed him, might not have been so pleasant as would at first be thought; and, surely, one might have selected a more agreeable domestic companion than the author of Paradise Lost. But, whatever mere infirmities of temper these men may have had, they had them in common with thousands who could not have suffered half so keenly as they, nor have lifted a finger to conquer. Hence it is that the world is sometimes thought to pardon too easily the faults of such men; when in reality it does not so much esteem them faults as the necessary consequences of certain organizations. Milton could not but have been passionate; but he teaches us to control passion. Shakspeare may have been too worldly and unsympathetic; the danger is that he makes us too thoughtful and generous to rise in the world. The vigor they had, lives and is immortal; their weakness has passed away along with the weakness of ten thousand other men. They have carried many souls upward

to elevations which those souls, by their own powers, could never have reached, nor maintained-carried them there, it may be, in thousands of cases, while they, by reason of innate weakness, were ever falling into vices

and crimes which would have otherwise absorbed their whole being. Thus the growth of spirit goes on in the universe, somewhat like the Aurora Borealis, when its spires shoot up fitfully in a long line across the arctic sky; now and then comes one more brilliant than its fellows, but the general sum of light is always the same; if we imagine an interdependence among the rays, so that each shall operate upon all near it in the ratio of the strength of each, we shall have a perfect exemplification of the manner in which the spirits of men operate upon one another, and by which a constantly disturbed, yet never changing equilibrium of the breath of life' is maintained throughout the race of mankind."

Thus for Von Dencken. We have not quoted this illustrious philosopher here to introduce our notice of Poe with an apology for his faults, but to indicate the point of view from which we design to contemplate him. We intend to consider him, not as a phenomenon, as an organic human being; to judge from what we read of his writings, and are informed of his life, what was his peculiar cast of soul; and thence to inquire how far he, a very feeble individual in body, certainly, and subjected to singular accidents, played a man's part on the stage of existence. This we shall endeavor to do through an estimate of his characteristics as a writer-since it is only as a writer, born with a peculiar spirit, and bred and living under peculiar circumstances, that the world has any concern with him. The mortal of him has returned to the dust; his imperfections, which remain in the memories of those who knew him, were better forgotten; since it aids none of us to remedy our own short-comings, to remember those of others after they are gone. According to the Von Denckenian theory, it is only with his peculium-the vital part of that combination of spirit and matter which erewhile walked these streets under the style of POE-that we have aught to do; for the reason that it is this part only, this individual vitality, to use the philosopher's nomenclature, which can combine with new affinities and re-enter the general soul of the universe-the man himself having departed, (upward, we trust, since

he held his face upward while here, through much oppression and depression) but his spiritual vigor being left to diffuse itself among his countrymen.

In the first place, then, PoE, in all his writings included here, appears as a pureminded gentleman-of a strange fancy, it is true, but never low or mean. He always addresses his readers in a scholarly attitude. He interests them through the better nature; he holds the mind's eye with singular pictures, or draws the understanding into curious speculations, but in the wildest of his extravagancies he does not forget his native dignity. Considering how difficult, not to say how impossible, it would have been for him to have done this amidst all the excitements of his feverish life, had it not been real and natural to him, we cannot but believe him to have been actually and in his very heart, what he appears in his pages.

Secondly, he seems to us to have been originally one of the most sensitive of men, and subject to peculiar nervous depressions; at the same time so constituted that his normal and healthful condition was one which required a great elevation of the spirits. If we imagine an extremely sensitive boy, full of fun and harmless mischief, suddenly chilled into a metaphysician, but with his early state still clinging to him, we think we have Poe precisely. No human being can be more ill-fitted for the struggle of life than such an one. The realities of existence overwhelm him; what excites others to press onward crushes him; their joy is his grief; their hope his despair; all his emotions become so intense and intolerable that he cannot endure them, and wildly endeavors to stifle feeling. Charles Lamb was constituted very much after this manner he cried at weddings and laughed at funerals; but he had habits of study, the influence of strong intellects, duty to his sister, and, perhaps, the fear of insanity, to restrain him.

Besides, Lamb's mind, though clear, was anything but mathematical in its tendencies; while with Poe's, this was a marked trait. Originally gifted with peculiar perceptions of the beauty of form, and of a disposition apt to perceive symmetrical relations both in things and ideas, Poe, when the blight came, found refuge in following out chains of thought in harmony with the

gloom that enshrouded him. Instead of avoiding the shadow he would boldly walk into it and analyze it. Hence comes his peculiar power. No writer ever understood better how to work upon the nervous system. He must have been able, one would think, to master the horror of the most awful night-mare that ever visited a dyspeptic couch, to have faced his own conceptions, and yet we can see often in his tales, glimpses of the native boyish glee that must have once been his life, and which still lurks behind his haunted imagination. And not only in his fancy, but apparently in his whole nature did the actual press upon him so heavily that his original youth was borne down, and he appeared to the world as through an inverting lens. The necessities from without, arising in part from his inward constitution,

"Shook so his single state of man, that function Was smothered in surmise; and nothing was, But what was not."

He himself, in reasoning upon it, seems to have reproached himself for it as a crime, when it was no more a crime than the despondency of Cowper. Several passages in his tales, though they touch the individual experience of every reader, seem to come from him like confessions. For example:

"And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart-one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?"

shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us,-of the

definite with the indefinite-of the substance

with the shadow. But, if the contest have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails, we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies-it disThe old energy reappears we are free. turns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!

"We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss-we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, the cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fallthis rushing annihilation-for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination -for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.”

There can be no doubt that this infirmity was experienced by Poe, almost as intensely as he has here represented it.

With the superficial there is only one name for any mental affliction which prevents a man from laboring when he has apparently every motive to labor, and every necessary ability. They call it "idleness," and they fancy that he who is thus afflicted is enjoying the luxury of repose, at the very moment when he is powerless under the torture of anxiety.

There was a true philosophy in the reply of the lusty beggar to the farmer, who asked him why he did not go to work-"Oh," said he, "if you only knew how lazy Iam!" He was above conventional notions, in the region of ultimate truth. The curse that was laid on the ground for Adam's sake bore so heavily on him that he could not find sufficient resolution to strive against it. Nevertheless, he was certainly a free and original thinker, and the story goes, that the farmer appreciated the sublimity of his answer.

But Poe, with all this depression or overexcitement, call it what we please, bearing upon him, inverting his original nature and rendering him incapable of self-control, was anything but an idle man. These tales and poems are not the offspring of an indolent brain. They are wrung from a soul that suffered and strove; from a fancy that was driven out from the sunny palaces of youth and hope, to wander in

"A wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of space-out of Time."

Even the bulk of what he has written is

look the destroyer in the face and to trick him out in theatrical horrors. With some there is a constant gnawing fear of the monster, and they avert their eyes from him, or now and then steal shuddering glances askance; with others there seems to be an utter inability to realize that they are immortal-that after a few years at most, of inevitably decreasing capacity for enjoyment, their souls will be in heaven or hell, and their bodies in the grave-the sun shining above and the throng of the living pressing on as before. For either of these kinds of readers, Poe's stories must be healthy diet; for the first, because he goes beyond their utmost agonies of apprehension, and stales and tames them; for the second, because he frightens their consciences-makes them wake and shudder, and form good resolutions, in the still watches of the night.

In several passages in his tales Poe has, unintentionally personated himself:

"My fancy grew charnal. I talked of worms, of tombs and epitaphs."

And again, in the same sketch, he takes us into the very gates of death:

"It might be asserted without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs the stifling fumes of the damp earth--the clinging to the death garments-the rigid embrace of the narrow house-the blackness of the absolute

Estimated by its quality, however, and compared with the productions of any of our writers of the same age, we think that Poe did his work as well as the best of them. The material he wrote in was finer. The class of readers whom he will find most favor with, are those of delicate fancies and who are subject to gloomy forebodings-a more numerous class than is often supposed, and of far more consequence -for though the politicians, the hard, noisy, impudent, and ambitious, do the work of governing the earth, it is the meek and pa

tient who inherit it.

With Poe, as with all men of genius, there was an ever-abiding consciousness of the presence of Death. He delighted to

Conqueror Worm--these things, with thoughts of the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informedthat our hopeless portion is that of the really dead---these considerations, I say, carry into the heart which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil."

Even where he does not deal directly with Death, he delights to take up and draw elaborately some one of those gloomy clouds that roll upward from the dark abyss. This is so well known to be his forte that we need give only one or two examples, and those such as will also illustrate presently a remark on his manner and style. The opening of "The Fall of the House of

Usher," is wilder and profounder than the introduction to Der Freyschutz:

'During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing along on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say, insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind. usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me-upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain; upon the bleak walls; upon the vacant eye-like windows; upon a few rank sedges; and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees; with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the revelfer upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life; the hideous dropping off the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart; an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it; I paused to think; what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as 1 pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possble, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and acting upon this idea I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before---upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows."

What a Salvator Rosa-like landscape is that which occurs in the course of "The Gold Bug :"

"We crossed the creek at the head of the island by means of a skiff, and, ascending the high grounds on the shore of the main land, proceeded in a northwesterly direction, through

a tract of country excessively wild and desolate, where no trace of a human footstep was to be seen. Legrand led the way with decision; pausing only for an instant, here and there to consult what appeared to be certain landmarks of his own contrivance upon a former occasion.

In this manner we journeyed for about two hours, and the sun was just setting when we entered a region infinitely more dreary than any yet seen. It was a species of table land, near the summit of an almost inaccessible hill, densely wooded from base to pinnacle, and interspersed with huge crags that appeared to lie loosely upon the soil, and in many cases were prevented from precipitating themselves into the valleys below, merely by the support of the trees against which they reclined. Deep ravines in various directions, gave an air of still sterner solemnity to the scene.”

And in the "M.S. found in a bottle," we have a sea view from an ocean that had not been visited before, since the voyage of the Ancient Mariner :

"Our course for the first four days was, with trifling variations, S. E. and by S.; and we must have run down the coast of New Holland. On the fifth day the cold became extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the northward. The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon, emitting no decisive light. There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver like rim alone, as, it rushed down the unfathomable ocean."

It is good to remain as child-like in our perceptions and affections as we can. Childdren are the most catholic of readers: only interest them and nothing comes amiss. One who can, like them, pass from the lively dialogue of Dumas, to these pictures of concentrated mysterious apprehension, and find amusement in both, will be likely never to die of ennui.

Many of these tales, if not all, were hastily written, and, they are therefore often Sometimes fragmentary and imperfect.

the plot is too obvious and the secret is out too soon; in others, the particular horror is