For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your
pen, and that in an age when the author of "To Helen" and "The Cask
of Amontillado" was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When
such poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep
than that of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton's, were
inevitable and assured. No man was less fortunate than you in the
moment of his birth--infelix opportunitate vitae. Had you lived a
generation later, honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at
home, would all have been yours. Within thirty years so great a
change has passed over the profession of letters in America; and it
is impossible to estimate the rewards which would have fallen to
Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of
"Called Back." It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in
the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite
unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a
respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as
"objectional" in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what
is meant by such a sentence as "his connection with it had inured to
his own benefit by the frequent puffs of himself," and so forth.

Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer
of short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and
elaborate poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own
brief definition of poetry, "the rhythmic creation of the
beautiful," exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory
illustrated by the poems. Natural bent, and reaction against the
example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of
what you call the "didactic" element in verse. Even if morality be
not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at present