In 1868 a world which had neglected Browning fell with enthusiasm on the four successive volumes of "The Ring and the Book". Here all persons concerned in a peculiarly brutal set of murders of 1698, and many lookers-on, give their own versions and their own views of the characters and events, while the lawyers have their say, and the Pope sums up all in a poem by a fourth part longer than the "Iliad".
The last twenty years of the poet's life were prolific in books very various in character from "Fifine at the Fair" (1872), and "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" (1873), to "Asolando," in 1889, the year of his death. His "Transcript" from Euripides is not merely rugged, but very quaint. The method is the old method, but a growing wilfulness often mars the results—the defect of Browning's quality. His resolute courage never failed; he was firm on the rock of his belief; but it is probable that he will always be best known by the work of his central period, from "Pippa Passes" to "Dramatis Personæ". He is the poet of love, of life, and of the will to live; here and beyond the grave; and he is the expounder, and, indeed, the creator, of innumerable characters, while, if his poetry lacks "natural magic," and supreme felicity of phrase, his pictures are largely and vigorously designed and coloured. No poet perhaps, save Scott, showed so little of the poet in general society; no man was more kindly and natural in his ways.
Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Poe, born in 1809 at Boston, was on the mother's side English, but in genius he was of no nationality. His parents, who were actors, died early, and he was adopted at the age of 2 by a gentleman of Virginia, Mr. Allan, with whom he passed five years in Europe (1815-1820). From the University of Virginia he passed, as poets are apt to do, in the disfavour of his dons, nor did he long abide at West Point, the military school, leaving in 1831 in very unfortunate circumstances. Like Shakespeare in the tradition he "was given to all manner of unluckiness," such as losing more money at cards than he could pay, which estranged his guardian. In 1827, at the age of 18, he had published the now almost indiscoverable volume of verse, "Tamerlane and Other Poems". He betook himself to journalism, writing verses, criticisms (whereby he made many enemies) and short stories. With his genius for these, whether tales of gruesome mystery, or of treasure-hunting, or of a marvellous detective, he would, in the America of to-day, have been rich, as authors count riches. But his pay was infinitesimal, and he lived in dire poverty, always longing for a magazine of his own; but his engagements as an editor were neither permanent nor lucrative. He was, in "The Gold Bug," the founder of all stories of hidden treasure, and all detective stories descend from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". In composing "crawlers," as R. L. Stevenson called tales of horror, he had no rival. He always avoided the supernatural; his effects were mortuary, and he was too partial to premature burials. His style was that of an artist, clean and sober, in "The Gold Bug," but in such pieces as "The Fall of the House of Usher" he aimed at poetical effects in prose. The doors of the doomed mansion "threw slowly back their ponderous and ebony jaws". Poe appears to have had the wish to be a scholar; he may even, by many allusions to unfamiliar books, give the impression that his reading is very wide, but scholarship was inconsistent with his restless and poverty-stricken life. Yet something of the fastidiousness of the scholar possessed him, and made him a student of style, and a relentless reviewer of the many nobodies who formed the majority of his literary contemporaries. His poetry is the very reverse of "a criticism of life". His heroes, if in love at all, are constant to some belle morte, Annabel Lee or the Lost Lenore; and he has no hope of attaining to the love of his most beautiful poem,—
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicèan barques of yore,
(where Nicèan seems to mean Phæacian). He combines the maximum of music in his verse with the minimum of human nature, of flesh and blood. His "Ulalume," with its recurrent and re-echoing double rhymes, trembles on the verge between pure nonsense and some realm beyond the bounds of known romanticism:—
Hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir.
Weir, we surmise, is not far from
the sunset land of Boshen,
In the midmost of the Ocean,