But your ingenuity, your completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of jewel-like words are not perhaps gifts which Mr. Hawthorne has at his command. He was a great writer-the greatest writer in prose fiction whom America has produced. But you and he have not much in common except a certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the working conscience.-Andrew Lang.

5. If Poe's life was a tangle of contradictions, his posthumous fame has been a very conflict of opposites. He has been elevated to heaven; he has been depressed to hell; he has been pictured angel and devil, drunkard and puritan. His poetry has seemed to this one the empty tinkling of a cymbal; to that, the last expression of verbal beauty. But despite the warfare of opinions, he has been read and imitated throughout the world, and he is still, after half a century, the dominant influence of three literatures.-Charles Whibley.

REFERENCES.

Edgar Poe and His Critics, Mrs. Whitman.

'Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Stedman and Woodberry. Edgar Allan Poe, Woodberry.

Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Gill.

Poem read at the Dedication of the Actors' Monument to Poe, May 4, 1885, William Winter.

QUESTIONS ON POE.

I. Tell the story of Poe's life.

2. Name five of his poems. Five prose works. One literary criticism.

3. How does Poe rank among the men of letters?

4.

Name incidents in his life which tended to make him the character that he was.

5. Which of Poe's poems do you like best? Why? 6. What is there about Poe's writings that holds the reader's interest?

7. Among what scenes are most of his poems laid? 8. Tell the story of The Raven.

9. With what American author has he been compared?

Why is Poe so little admired in his own country?

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages.-Lamartine.

CHAPTER II.

SOME POPULAR POETS OF
LATER DATE.

Poet! esteem thy noble part,
Still listen, still record,

Sacred historian of the heart,

And moral nature's lord.

-Milnes.

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY.

JOAQUIN MILLER.

EUGENE FIELD.

WILL CARLETON.

Poetry is a great and beautiful utterance set in an artistic frame. As a river moves along, ornamented by its banks on which wave trees and grass and flutter the wings of happy birds, so rhyme and rhythm and metric feet are only the attractive borders of some deep stream of truth.-Professor Swing.