The horrors which mysteriously beset these persons, and against which, so far as outward facts go, they often strive in vain, are but a representation of those powers permitted to work in the same way throughout the affairs of this world. Their demoniacal attributes only represent a morbid state of the intellect, gone to excess from want of balance with the other powers. There is an intellectual as well as a physical drunkenness, and which, no less, impels to crime. Carwin, urged on to use his ventriloquism till the presence of such a strange agent wakened the seeds of fanaticism in the breast of Wieland, is in a state no more foreign to nature than that of the wretch executed last week, who felt himself drawn as by a spell to murder his victim, because he had thought of her money and the pleasures it might bring him, till the feeling possessed his brain that hurls the gamester to ruin. The victims of such agency are like the soldier of the Rio Grande, who, both legs shot off, and his life-blood rushing out with every pulse, replied serenely to his pitying comrades, that "he had now that for which the soldier enlisted." The end of the drama is not in this world, and the fiction which rounds off the whole to harmony and felicity before the curtain falls, sins against truth, and deludes the reader. The Nelsons of the human race are all the more exposed to the assaults of Fate, that they are decorated with the badges of well-earned glory. Who but feels as they fall in death, or rise again to a mutilated existence, that the end is not yet? Who, that thinks, but must feel that the recompense is, where Brown places it, in the accumulation of mental treasure, in the severe assay by fire that leaves the gold pure to be used some time—somewhere?
Brown,—man of the brooding eye, the teeming brain, the deep and fervent heart,—if thy country prize thee not, and had almost lost thee out of sight, it is because her heart is made shallow and cold, her eye dim, by the pomp of circumstance, the love of gross outward gain. She cannot long continue thus, for it takes a great deal of soul to keep a huge body from disease and dissolution. As there is more soul, thou wilt be more sought; and many will yet sit down with thy Constantia to the meal and water on which she sustained her full and thoughtful existence, who could not endure the ennui of aldermanic dinners, or find any relish in the imitation of French cookery. To-day many will read the words, and some have a cup large enough to receive the spirit, before it is lost in the sand on which their feet are planted.
Brown's high standard of the delights of intellectual communion and of friendship, correspond with the fondest hopes of early days. But in the relations of real life, at present, there is rarely more than one of the parties ready for such intercourse as he describes. On the one side there will be dryness, want of perception, or variety, a stupidity unable to appreciate life's richest boon when offered to its grasp; and the finer nature is doomed to retrace its steps, unhappy as those who, having force to raise a spirit, cannot retain or make it substantial, and stretch out their arms only to bring them back empty to the breast.
We were glad to see these reprints, but sorry to see them so carelessly done. Under the cheap system, the carelessness in printing and translating grows to a greater excess day by day. Please, Public, to remonstrate; else very soon all your books will be offered for two shillings apiece, and none of them in a fit state to be read.
EDGAR A. POE.[9]
MR. POE throws down the gauntlet in his preface by what he says of "the paltry compensations, or more paltry commendations, of mankind." Some champion might be expected to start up from the "somewhat sizable" class embraced, or, more properly speaking, boxed on the ear, by this defiance, who might try whether the sting of Criticism was as indifferent to this knight of the pen as he professes its honey to be.
Were there such a champion, gifted with acumen to dissect, and a swift-glancing wit to enliven the operation, he could find no more legitimate subject, no fairer game, than Mr. Poe, who has wielded the weapons of criticism without relenting, whether with the dagger he rent and tore the garment in which some favored Joseph had pranked himself, secure of honor in the sight of all men, or whether with uplifted tomahawk he rushed upon the new-born children of some hapless genius, who had fancied, and persuaded his friends to fancy, that they were beautiful, and worthy a long and honored life. A large band of these offended dignitaries and aggrieved parents must be on the watch for a volume of "Poems by Edgar A. Poe," ready to cut, rend, and slash in turn, and hoping to see his own Raven left alone to prey upon the slaughter of which it is the herald.
Such joust and tournament we look to see, and, indeed, have some stake in the matter, so far as we have friends whose wrongs cry aloud for the avenger. Natheless we could not take part in the mêlée, except to join the crowd of lookers-on in the cry "heaven speed the right!"
Early we read that fable of Apollo who rewarded the critic, who had painfully winnowed the wheat,—with the chaff for his pains. We joined the gentle Affirmative School, and have confidence that if we indulge ourselves chiefly with the appreciation of good qualities, Time will take care of the faults. For Time holds a strainer like that used in the diamond mines—have but patience and the water and gravel will all pass through, and only the precious stones be left. Yet we are not blind to the uses of severe criticism, and of just censure, especially in a time and place so degraded by venal and indiscriminate praise as the present. That unholy alliance; that shameless sham, whose motto is,
| "Caw me |
| And I'll caw thee;" |