To my random, reeling rhyme,
By the sands along the shore,
Where the tempest whispers, “Pay him!” and I answer
“Nevermore!”
Galahad: What do you mean by the reference to Horace Greeley?
Zoïlus: I thought everybody had heard that Greeley’s only autograph of Poe was a signature to a promissory note for fifty dollars. He offers to sell it for half the money. Now, I don’t mean to be wicked, and to do nothing with the dead except bone ’em, but when such a cue pops into one’s mind, what is one to do?
The Ancient: O, I think you’re still within decent limits! There was a congenital twist about poor Poe. We can’t entirely condone his faults, yet we stretch our charity so as to cover as much as possible. His poetry has a hectic flush, a strange, fascinating, narcotic quality, which belongs to him alone. Baudelaire and Swinburne after him have been trying to surpass him by increasing the dose; but his Muse is the natural Pythia, inheriting her convulsions, while they eat all sorts of insane roots to produce theirs.
Galahad (eagerly): Did you ever know him?
The Ancient: I met him two or three times, heard him lecture once (his enunciation was exquisite), and saw him now and then in Broadway,—enough to satisfy me that there were two men in him: one, a refined gentleman, an aspiring soul, an artist among those who had little sense of literary art; the other—
Zoïlus: Go on!