For, alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o'er!
No more—no more—no more!—
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,
Or the stricken eagle soar.
But the man with a feeling for highly emotional poetry and an ear for the rhythms in which such poetry should be couched is not likely, I think, to underrate these appealing verses.
Lowell and Emerson represent, however, a former generation, and so does the notorious ballot for the ten best or favorite American books taken a good many years ago by the weekly journal The Critic, a ballot in which Poe did not even manage to come in at the foot of the poll. But fully twenty years later I find a modern American critic writing about Poe's "unlimited scholarly ignorance"—whatever that may mean—and it is in this twentieth century that I myself have had to conduct a correspondence with the principal of a school in one of our greatest States who regretted that he could not permit my History of American Literature to enter his school library for the reason—not that I had treated Poe too harshly or too favorably—but that I had treated him at all. School children, according to my correspondent, ought not to know that such a life was ever lived.
But this, you may say, is too bizarre an experience to be made the basis of any sort of argument. Perhaps so, but it is not my sole experience of the kind. I have also had to correspond with a teacher on the other side of the
