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! Tears fell, when thou wert dying, When hearts, whose truth was proven, And I, who woke each morrow It should be mine to braid it While memory bids me weep thee, 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 In dreams, through camp and court, he bore In dreams his song of triumph heard; Then pressed that monarch's throne-a king; As Eden's Garden bird. At midnight, in the forest shades, Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band, True as the steel of their tried blades, *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 And now there breathed that haunted air As quick, as far as they. An hour passed on-the Turk awoke; "To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!" And death shots falling thick and fast "Strike-till the last armed foe expires; They fought-like brave men, long and well; 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 Like flowers at set of sun. Come to the bridal-chamber, Death! That close the pestilence are broke, Come when the heart beats high and warm, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier; But to the hero, when his sword Has won the battle for the free, Of sky and stars to prisoned men: When the land-wind, from woods of palm, Bozzaris! with the storied brave Greece nurtured in her glory's time, 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: |