ever have disciples who has not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a
disciple. Great wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they are
possessed and carried away by their demon, While talent keeps him, as
Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of his sword. To the
eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is ever rent asunder
that it may perceive the ministers of good and evil who throng
continually around it. No man of mere talent ever flung his inkstand
at the devil.

When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he
has produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it
at all is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence
for the trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and
the greenest laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses; and
Aristotles of our newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the
loftiest order to render a place among them at all desirable, whether
for its hardness of attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of
our Parnassus is, according to these gentlemen, by far the most
thickly settled portion of the country, a circumstance which must
make it an uncomfortable residence for individuals of a poetical
temperament, if love of solitude be, as immemorial tradition asserts,
a necessary part of their idiosyncrasy.

Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of
vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of
imagination. The first of these faculties is as needful to the artist
in words, as a knowledge of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in
stone. This enables him to conceive truly, to maintain a proper
relation of parts, and to draw a correct outline, while the second
groups, fills up and colors. Both of these Mr. Poe has displayed with