dulgence of his passions, he, as John Bunyan has it, "tempted the devil," and became the bound victim of infernal influence. In this age of scepticism such a theory is sure to be laughed at, but is not the less likely to be true. If ever man in modern times resembled at least a demoniac, "exceeding fierce, and dwelling among tombs"-possessed now by a spirit of fury, and now by a spirit of falsehood, and now by an "unclean spirit"-it was Poe, as he rushed with his eyes open into every excess of riot; or entered the house of his intended bride on the night before the anticipated marriage, and committed such outrages as to necessitate a summons of the police to remove the drunk and raving demon; or ran howling through the midnight like an evil spirit on his way to the Red Sea, battered by the rains, beaten by the winds, waving aloft his arms in frenzy, cursing loud and deep man, himself, God, and proclaiming that he was already damned, and damned for In demoniac possession, too, of a different kind, it was that he fancied the entire secret of the making of the universe to be revealed to him, and went about everywhere shouting, "Eureka "a title, too, which he gave to the strange and splendid lecture in which he recorded the memorable illusion. And when the spirit of talk came at times mightily upon him --when the "witch element" seemed to surround him-when his brow flushed like an evening cloud--when his eyes glared wild lightning-when his hair stood up like the locks of a Bacchante-when his chest heaved, and his voice rolled and swelled like subterranean thunder-men, admiring, fearing, and wondering, said, "He hath a demon, yea, seven devils are entered into him." His tongue was then "set on fire," but set on fire of hell; and its terrific inspiration rayed out of every gesture and look, and spake in every tone.

ever.

"Madness!" it will be cried again; but that word does not fully express the nature of Poe's excitement in these fearful hours. There was no incoherence either in his matter or in his words. There was, amid all the eloquence and poetry of his talk, a vein of piercing, searching, logical, but sinister thought. All his faculties were shown in the same lurid light, and touched by the same torch of the Furies. All blazed emulous of each other's fire. The awful Soul which had entered his soul formed an exact counterpart to it, and the haggard "dream was

one."

One is reminded of the words of Aird, in his immor tai poem, "The Demoniac:"

Perhaps by hopeless passions bound,

And render'd weak, the mastery a demon o'er him found:
Reason and duty all, all life, his being all became
Subservient to the wild, strange law that overbears his frame;
And in the dead hours of the night, when happier children lie

In slumbers seal'd, he journeys far the flowing rivers by.

And oft he haunts the sepulchres, where the thin shoals of ghosts

Flit shiv'ring from death's chilling dews; to their unbodied hosts
That churm through night their feeble plaint, he yells; at the red morn
Meets the great armies of the winds, high o'er the mountains borne,
Leaping against their viewless rage, tossing his arms on high,
And hanging balanced o'er sheer steeps against the morning sky."

We are tempted to add the following lines, partly for their Dantesque power, and partly because they describe still more energetically than the last quotation such a tremendous pos session as was Herman's in fiction, and Poe's in reality :—

"He rose; a smother'd gleam

Was on his brow; with fierce motes roll'd his eye's distemper'd beam;
He smiled, 'twas as the lightning of a hope about to die

For ever from the furrow'd brows of hell's eternity;

Like sun-warm'd snakes, rose on his head a storm of golden hair,
Tangled; and thus on Miriam fell hot breathings of despair:

'Perish the breasts that gave me milk! yea, in thy mouldering heart:
Good thrifty roots I'll plant, to stay next time my hunger's smart.
Red-vein'd derived apples I shall eat with savage haste,

And see thy life-blood blushing through, and glory in the taste." "

Herman, in the poem, has a demon sent into his heart, in divine sovereignty, and that he may be cured by the power of Christ. But Poe had Satan substituted for soul, apparently to torment him before the time; and we do not see him ere the end sitting,"clothed, and in his right mind, at the feet of Jesus." He died, as he had lived, a raving, cursing, self-condemned, conscious cross between the fiend and the genius, believing nothing, hoping nothing, loving nothing, fearing nothing-himself his own god and his own devil-a solitary wretch, who had cut off every bridge that connected him with the earth around and the heavens above. This, however, let us say in his favor-he has died "alone in his iniquity;" he has never, save by his example (so far as we know his works), sought to shake faith or sap morality. His writings may be

morbid, but they are pure; and, if his life was bad has he not left it as a legacy to moral anatomists, who have met and wondered over it, although they have given up all attempt at dissection or diagnosis, shaking the head, and leaving him alone in its shroud, with the solemn whispered warning to the world, and especially to its stronger and brighter spirits, "Beware!"

A case so strange as Poe's compels us into new and more searching forms of critical, as well as of moral analysis. Genius has very generally been ascribed to him; but some will resist and deny the ascription-proceeding partly upon peculiar notions of what genius is, and partly from a very natural reluctance to concede to a wretch so vile a gift so noble, and in a degree, too, so unusually large. Genius has often been defined as something inseparably connected with the genial nature. If this definition be correct, Poe was not a genius any more than Swift, for geniality neither he nor his writings possessed. But if genius mean a compound of imagination and inventiveness, original thought heated by passion and accompanied by power of fancy, Poe was a man of great genius. In wanting geniality, however, he wanted all that makes genius lovely and beloved, at once beautiful and dear. A man of genius, without geniality, is a mountain clad in snow, companioned by tempests, and visited only by hardy explorers who love sublime nakedness, and to snatch a fearful joy from gazing down black precipices; a man whose genius is steeped in the genial nature, is an autumn landscape, suggesting not only images of beauty, and giving thrills of delight, but yielding peaceful and plenteous fruits, and in which the heart finds a rest and a home. From the one the timid, the weak, and the gentle retire in a terror which overpowers their admiration; but in the other the lowest and feeblest find shelter and repose. Even Dante and Milton, owing to the excess of their intellectual and imaginative powers over their genial feelings, are less loved than admired; while the vast supremacy of Shakspeare is due, not merely to his universal genius, but to the predominance of geniality and heart in all his writings. Many envy and even hate Dante and Milton; and had Shakspeare only written his loftier tragedies, many might have hated and envied him too; but who can entertain any such feelings for the author of the Comedy of Errors" and "Twelfth Night," the creator of Fal

staff, Dogberry, and Verres? If genius be the sun geniality is the atmosphere through which alone his beams can penetrate with power, or be seen with pleasure.

Poe is distinguished by many styles and many manners. He is the author of fictions as matter-of-fact in their construction and language as the stories of Defoe, and of tales as wierd and wonderful as those of Hoffman; of amatory strains trembling, if not with heart, with passion, and suffused with the purple glow of love, and of poems, dirges either in form or in spirit, into which the genius of desolation has shed its dreariest essence; of verses, gay with apparent, but shallow joy, and of others dark with a misery which reminds us of the helpless, hopeless, infinite misery, which sometimes visits the souls in dreams. But, amid all this diversity of tone and of subject, the leading qualities of his mind are obvious. These consist of strong imagination-an imagination, however, more fertile in incidents, forms, and characters, than in images; keen power of analysis, rather than synthetic genius; immense inventiveness; hot passions, cooled down by the presence of art, till they resemble sculptured flame, or "lightning in the hand of a painted Jupiter;" knowledge rather récherché and varied, than strict, accurate, or profound; and an unlimited command of words, phrases, musical combinations of sound, and all the other materials of an intellectual workman. The direction of these powers was controlled principally by his habits and circumstances. These made him morbid; and his writings have all a certain morbidity about them. You say at once, cool and clear as most of them are, these are not the productions of a healthy or happy man. But surely never was there such a calm despair-such a fiery torment so cased in ice! When you compare the writings with the known facts of the author's history, they appear to be so like, and so unlike, his character. You seem looking at an inverted image. You have the features, but they are discovered at an unexpected angle. You see traces of the misery of a confirmed debauchee, but none of his disconnected ravings, or of the partial imbecility which often falls upon his powers. There is a strict, almost logical, method, in his wildest productions. He tells us himself that he wrote "The Raven" as coolly as if he had been working out a mathematical problem. His frenzy, if that name must

be given to the strange fire which was in him, is a conscious one; he feels his own pulse when it is at the wildest, and looks at his foaming lips in the looking-glass.

Poe was led by a singular attraction to all dark, dreadful, and disgusting objects and thoughts: maelstroms, mysteries, murders, mummies, premature burials, excursions to the moon, solitary mansions surrounded by mist and weighed down by mysterious dooms, lonely tarns, trembling to the winds of autumn, and begirt by the shivering ghosts of woods-these are the materials which his wild imagination loves to work with, and out of them to weave the most fantastic and dismal of worlds. Yet there's "magic in the web." You often revolt at his subjects; but no sooner does he enter on them, than your attention is riveted, you lend him your ears-nay, that is a feeble word, you surrender your whole being to him for a season, although it be as you succumb, body and soul, to the dominion of a nightmare. What greatly increases effect, as in "Gulliver's Travels," is the circumstantiality with which he recounts the most amazing and incredible things. His tales, too, are generally cast into the autobiographical form, which adds much to their living vraisemblance and vivid power. It is Coleridge's "Old Mariner" over again. Strange, wild, terrible, is the tale he has to tell; haggard, wo-begone, unearthly is the appearance of the narrator. Every one at first, like the wedding guest, is disposed to shrink and beat his breast; but he holds you with his glittering eye, he forces you to follow him into his own enchanted region, and once there, you forget everything, your home, your friends, your creed, your very personal identity, and become swallowed up like a straw in the maelstrom of his story, and forget to breathe till it is ended, and the mysterious tale-teller is gone. And during all the wild and whirling narrative, the same chilly glitter has continued to shine in his eye, his blood has never warmed, and he has never exalted his voice above a thrilling whisper.

Poe's power may perhaps be said to be divisible into two parts: first, that of adding an air of circumstantial verity to incredibilities; and, secondly, that of throwing a wierd lustre upon commonplace events. He tells fiction so minutely, and with such apparent simplicity and sincerity, that you almost believe it true; and he so combines and so recounts such inci