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Of his poems, the same authority remarks, "Their elabo ration is minute, their metre exquisite, both in its adapta tion and polish. In this, indeed, lies their principal power; and perhaps a great part of the charm which they have is a kind of ear-jugglery. They do not move the heart, for of feeling there is an essential want. His poetry, as he himself tells us, is the result of cold, mathematical calculation."

"But it is through his tales that Poe is best known, and in them is displayed the real bent of his genius. Their chief characteristic is a grim horror-sometimes tangible, but usually shadowy and dim. He revelled in faintly sketching scenes of ghastly gloom, in imagining the most impossible plots, and in making them seem real by minute detail. His wild and weird conceptions have great power; but they affect the fears only, rarely the heart; while sometimes his morbid creations are repulsive and shocking; yet in the path he has chosen he is unrivalled."*

* Cleveland's Compendium of American Literature.

HALLECK.

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK was born at Guilford, Connecticut, in August, 1790. In boyhood the poetical faculty manifested itself, and so genuine and deep-rooted was its planting that not even the prosaic and distracting employments of a life spent mainly in mercantile pursuits could prevent the divine germ from growing into a goodly perfection.

From his eighteenth year until his fifty-fourth he resided in New York City. Here it was he achieved his earliest celebrity as a town wit and as a political and social satirist under the pseudonym of "Croaker & Co.," J. R. Drake being the other member of this literary firm. The death of this early and beloved associate, in 1820, gave birth to the fol lowing tender elegy from our poet's pen:

GREEN be the turf above thee,

Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.

Tears fell, when thou wert dying,
From eyes unused to weep,
And long where thou art lying
Will tears the cold turf steep.

When hearts, whose truth was proven,
Like thine, are laid in earth,
There should a wreath be woven
To tell the world their worth;

And I, who woke each morrow
To clasp thy hand in mine,
Who shared thy joy and sorrow,
Whose weal and wo were thine;

It should be mine to braid it
Around thy faded brow,
But I've in vain essayed it,
And feel I cannot now.

While memory bids me weep thee,
Nor thoughts nor words are free,
The grief is fixed too deeply

That mourns a man like thee.

Fanny, his longest poem, was published in 1821. "It is a satirical squib, in Don Juan measure, at the fashionable literary and political enthusiasms of the day.' The next year our author visited England and the Continent, and as a reminiscence of the tour has left us Alnwick Castle. This poem, together with Burns, Marco Bozzaris, and several others, were gathered into a volume, published in 1827. As one of the noblest and most imperishable lyrics in the language we quote, unmutilated,

MARCO BOZZARIS.†

AT midnight, in his guarded tent,

The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power:

In dreams, through camp and court, he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;

In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring;

Then pressed that monarch's throne-a king;
As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,

As Eden's Garden bird.

At midnight, in the forest shades,

Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band,

True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.

*Duyckinck's Cyclopædia of American Literature.

† Marco Bozzaris, one of the bravest of the modern Greek chieftains, fell in a night attack upon the Turkish camp at Laspi, the site of the ancient Platæa, August, 1823, and expired at the moment of victory.

There had the Persian's thousands stood,

There had the glad earth drunk their blood
On old Platæa's day;

And now there breathed that haunted air
The sons of sires who conquered there,
With arm to strike, and soul to dare,

As quick, as far as they.

An hour passed on-the Turk awoke;
That bright dream was his last;
He woke to hear the sentries shriek,

"To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!"
He woke to die midst flame and smoke,
And shout, and groan, and sabre stroke,

And death shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain cloud;
And heard, with voice as trumpet loud,
Bozzaris cheer his band:

"Strike-till the last armed foe expires;
Strike-for your altars and your fires;
Strike for the green graves of your sires;
God-and your native land!"

They fought-like brave men, long and well;
They piled that ground with Moslem slain,
They conquered-but Bozzaris fell,

Bleeding at every vein.

His few surviving comrades saw

His smile when rang their proud hurrah,

And the red field was won;

Then saw in death his eyelids close
Calmly, as to a night's repose,

Like flowers at set of sun.

Come to the bridal-chamber, Death!
Come to the mother's, when she feels,
For the first time, her first-born's breath;
Come when the blessed seals

That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke;
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm;

Come when the heart beats high and warm,
With banquet song, and dance, and wine;
And thou art terrible-the tear,

The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier;
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony, are thine.

But to the hero, when his sword

Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word;
And in its hollow tones are heard
The thanks of millions yet to be.
Come, when his task of fame is wrought-
Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought—
Come in her crowning hour-and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight

Of sky and stars to prisoned men:
Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land;
Thy summons welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese,

When the land-wind, from woods of palm,
And orange groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.

Bozzaris! with the storied brave

Greece nurtured in her glory's time,
Rest thee there is no prouder grave,
Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral weeds for thee,

Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume, Like torn branch from death's leafless tree In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,

The heartless luxury of the tomb:
But she remembers thee as one
Long loved, and for a season gone;
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings the birth-day bells.
Of thee her babes' first lisping tells;

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