AN APPENDIX OF AUTOGRAPHS.
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BY EDGAR A. POE.
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In our November and December numbers we gave fac-simile signatures of no less than one hundred and nine of the most distinguished American literati. Our design was to furnish the readers of the Magazine with a complete series of Autographs, embracing a specimen of the MS. of each of the most noted among our living male and female writers. For obvious reasons, we made no attempt at classification or arrangement—either in reference to reputation or our own private opinion of merit. Our second article will be found to contain as many of the Dii majorum gentium as our first; and this, our third and last, as many as either—although fewer names, upon the whole, than the preceding papers. The impossibility of procuring the signatures now given, at a period sufficiently early for the immense edition of December, has obliged us to introduce this Appendix.
It is with great pleasure that we have found our anticipations fulfilled, in respect to the popularity of these chapters—our individual claim to merit is so trivial that we may be permitted to say so much—but we confess it was with no less surprise than pleasure that we observed so little discrepancy of opinion manifested in relation to the hasty critical, or rather gossiping observations which accompanied the signatures. Where the subject was so wide and so necessarily personal—where the claims of more than one hundred literati, summarily disposed of, were turned over for re-adjudication to a press so intricately bound up in their interest as is ours—it is really surprising how little of dissent was mingled with so much of general comment. The fact, however, speaks loudly to one point:—to the unity of truth. It assures us that the differences which exist among us, are differences not of real, but of affected opinion, and that the voice of him who maintains fearlessly what he believes honestly, is pretty sure to find an echo (if the speaker be not mad) in the vast heart of the world at large.
The “Writings of Charles Sprague” were first collected and published about nine months ago, by Mr. Charles S. Francis, of New-York. At the time of the issue of the book, we expressed our opinion frankly, in respect to the general merits of the author—an opinion with which one or two members of the Boston press did not see fit to agree—but which, as yet, we have found no reason for modifying. What we say now is, in spirit, merely a repetition of what we said then. Mr. Sprague is an accomplished belles-lettres scholar, so far as the usual ideas of scholarship extend. He is a very correct rhetorician of the old school. His versification has not been equalled by that of any American—has been surpassed by no one, living or dead. In this regard there are to be found finer passages in his poems than any elsewhere. These are his chief merits. In the essentials of poetry he is excelled by twenty of our countrymen whom we could name. Except in a very few instances he gives no evidence of the loftier ideality. His “Winged Worshippers” and “Lines on the Death of M. S. C.” are beautiful poems—but he has written nothing else which should be called so. His “Shakspeare Ode,” upon which his high reputation mainly depended, is quite a second-hand affair—with no merit whatever beyond that of a polished and vigorous versification. Its imitation of “Collins’ Ode to the Passions” is obvious. Its allegorical conduct is mawkish, passé, and absurd. The poem, upon the whole, is just such a one as would have obtained its author an Etonian prize some forty or fifty years ago. It is an exquisite specimen of mannerism without meaning and without merit—of an artificial, but most inartistical style of composition, of which conventionality is the soul,—taste, nature and reason the antipodes. A man may be a clever financier without being a genius.