a man whose genius was more considerable than his judgment or his
manners. He tried, at first, to conciliate the New England authorities,
and he flattered not merely the greater planets but some of the very
little stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher P.
Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that his blandishments
were of no avail, he turned savage, and tried to prove that he did not
care, by being rude to Bryant and Longfellow. He called the whole solemn
Sanhedrim a college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, he
closed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central aim and object
of the excellent men who at that time ruled American literature was to
prove that, in what this impertinent young man from Virginia called the
Frog Pond, the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its
home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the recognition of
Europe, which began to flow in richly just as Poe ceased to be able to
enjoy it, the prestige of this remarkable poet might have been
successfully annihilated.

Nor was it only the synod of Boston wits who issued the edict that he
should be ignored, but in England also many good judges of literature,
especially those who belonged to the intellectual rather than the
artistic class, could not away with him. I recollect hearing Leslie
Stephen say, now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms of
praise for Poe was "simply preposterous." And one whom I admire so
implicitly that I will not mention his name in a context which is not
favourable to his judgment, wrote (in his haste) of Poe's "singularly
valueless verses."

This opposition, modified, it is true, by the very different attitude
adopted by Tennyson and most subsequent English poets, as well as by
Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the whole younger school in France, was