hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At last some newer name takes their place, it may be, - but you inquire a little and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the Chaunceys or the Ellerys or some of the

intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain of 5 blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism;

old historic scholars, disguised under the 10 thank God for it, but do not let it make altered name of a female descendant.

I suppose there is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general distinction. But the 15 reader who has never been a teacher will very probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come direct from the homespun-clad class of the people, and he may, perhaps, even 20 find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude of those who 25 are continually working their way up into the intellectual classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as well 30 as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which drips through your appara- 35 tus of sands and sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into

you illogical. The race of the hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal of animal vigor. The scholar who comes by Nature's special grace from an unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality. A man's breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add muscular) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as his thinking organs. You broke down in your great speech, did you? Yes, your grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too hard on his famous Election Sermon. All this does not touch the main fact: our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best fruits come from well-known grafts, though now and then a seedling apple, like the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel, springs from a nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the gardens in the land.

Atlantic Monthly, January, 1860.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

Poe was the only prominent American poet of the mid-century whose genius was nurtured outside of the New England environment. All his life he was at odds with Boston ideals and the Boston writers. He quarreled with Lowell, he accused Longfellow of plagiarism, and he sneered at Margaret Fuller, and yet, by a strange fatality, he was himself Boston born,- his parents, who were actors, were professionally employed there at the time, and eighteen years later he published there his first volume, Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. Poe was no Bostonian: he was essentially Southern, both by parentage and training. His father was a native of Baltimore, his mother an English actress who had come to the South. Both died the same year, 1811, and their boy was adopted into the family of a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Virginia, Mr. Allan, and reared as his own son. The years from six to eleven he spent in England whither his foster-father had gone for business reasons. Returning, he was prepared in a Richmond school and by private tutors for the University of Virginia where he was matriculated at the age of seventeen. After a year spent unprofitably in gambling and dissipation, he was withdrawn by Mr. Allan, and given a place in his counting house, but business could not hold the restless young poet. Suddenly he disappeared and it was not until two years later that his foster parents discovered him in the United States army. It is only of recent years that the mystery of this lost period in the poet's life has been cleared up. His early biographers, aided it must be confessed by Poe's own tales, filled the two years with Byronic adventure, but it is now proved that he spent the first year with his regiment at Boston,publishing there his first volume, and that he was later transferred to Charleston, S. C., and then to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, where the family discovered him. Mr. Allan at once took steps to have him transferred to West Point where he might enter the profession like a gentleman, but as usual a fatality seemed to attend all his efforts for the boy. No sooner had Poe entered upon his West Point career than he became dissatisfied, asked Mr. Allan to allow him to resign, and, being refused, took steps that resulted in his dismissal from the institution. Thrown now upon his own resources, Mr. Allan having at last disinherited him, Poe at length turned to literature. Like Hawthorne he began with short stories contributed to newspapers and magazines. In 1833 he won a prize of one hundred dollars offered by a Baltimore paper, and, what is more, attracted the attention of John P. Kennedy who put him in the way of becoming a regular contributor to The Southern Literary Messenger.

The remainder of his life falls into three periods: 1. The Southern Literary Messenger period, 1835-1837, during which time he arose from a minor assistant's position to that of editor-in-chief; 2. The Philadelphia period, 1838-1844, during which time he was successively editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, and Graham's Magazine, and was the most prominent contributor to the Saturday Museum, writing during the period much of his best work, best in all its fields, poetry, fiction, criticism,- and 3. The New York period which began with 1844 and ended with his death in 1849. During these last years he was connected with two magazines: Willis's Evening Mirror, for which he acted as literary critic, and the Broadway Journal, of which in 1845 he became sole editor and proprietor. The magazine dying in 1846, he was for the rest of his life a kind of literary vagabond without abiding literary domicile or stable plans. The twenty years of his literary life produced many editions of his prose and poetry, the most significant being Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 1829, Poems, 1831, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1839, The Raven, and Other Poems, 1845, Tales, 1845, Eureka: A Prose Poem, 1848.

Poe was essentially a magazine editor: he thought in terms of 'copy'; he had his readers constantly in mind: he must interest and hold them. He was an artist who understood the rules of his art; his bent was analytic,- there was something architectonic in all that he did. It made him a critic: whenever his sympathies or his prejudices were not involved his criticisms were sound and penetrating. Poetry was with him 'à passion.' In this he was of Coleridge rather than of Wordsworth, a haunter of the realms beyond the bounds of sense, a poet of beauty, of art for the sake of art.

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 luster by the dwelling, and gazed down but with a shudder even more thrilling than before-upon the re- 10 other, it was this deficiency, perhaps, of modeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

ways, with a very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the 5 character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of 15 some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a dis- 20 tant part of the country- a letter from him which in its wildly importunate nature had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of 25 acute bodily illness, of a mental disorder which oppressed him, and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my 30 society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said it was the apparent heart that went with his requestwhich allowed me no room for hesitation; 35 and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular sum

mons.

Although as boys we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of 40 my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, display- 45 ing itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested of late in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, per- 50 haps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put 55 forth at no period any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had al

collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission from sire to son of the patrimony with the name, which had at length so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the House of Usher, an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment, that of looking down within the tarn, had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition for why should I not so term it? served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy,- a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar te themselves and their immediate vicinity: an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn; a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the