Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/775

 isoo-so] The Knickerbocker Magazine. Poe. 743 Poe was an erratic, sporadic man of genius, whose restless life was never closely associated with any particular part of the country. He has been claimed by New England because he happened to be born in Boston, and by the South because he was adopted by a gentleman of Richmond. On the whole, so far as one may classify him anywhere, he seems most in place among the writers of the Middle States. His genius was of the kind which involves meretricious individuality ; he was essentially histrionic ; he could not be honestly himself without a touch of conscious affectation. But he had at once a deep sense of rather melodramatic horror, which makes his tales extraordinarily stirring, and an intuitive sense of form peculiarly his own. This gives admirable precision both to the outline of his tales and to the rhythm and cadence of his haunting style. In his poems, meanwhile, there is a kind of lyric quality different from any to be found elsewhere, a fantastic melody which has made many who love art for art's sake rate him among the truly great. But if it is asked what he really had to say, the answer must be the same as that to any similar question concerning Bryant, or Cooper, or Irving, or Brockden Brown; namely, not much. For the more serious literature of America we must turn to the New England which was contemporary with Poe. We have already seen how the general awakening of national con- sciousness which followed the Revolution had aroused eastern New England to the assertion of a new theology. During the years when Irving and Cooper and Bryant were making literature in New York, the Unitarian movement was taking possession of the old Boston pulpits. It is a striking coincidence that the year in which Emerson resigned his ministry, for want of sympathy with the sacrament an act which marks the date when religious philosophy attained unfettered freedom in New England was that very year 1832 in which Scott died, and in which Bryant published at New York the first important collection of his poems. At that time the pure literature of New England was hardly in existence ; but there were already other tendencies, besides the philosophical, which indicated what it was soon to be. Of these the earliest to declare itself was the school of oratory which developed itself in Boston. Throughout America, to be sure, the popular appetite for public speaking has been unusually large ; but in New England the ancestral habit of listening to sermons was more deeply rooted than elsewhere. Accordingly the lay sermons with which the orators of revolutionary times and of the succeeding century replaced the theological discourses of earlier days were received in New England with special eagerness ; and the masters of rhetoric who discoursed there seem, on the whole, not only the most accomplished of all, but also the most broadly typical of what American oratory has been. The chief of these orators was Daniel Webster, equally eminent as an advocate, as a parliamentary debater, and as a maker of elaborate occasional orations. CH. XXIII.