Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/32

 might be difficult to cull from any American critic of equal standing with Professor Saintsbury utterances with regard to Poe quite so extraordinary as those of the British critic with regard to Byron; but it is easy to show that, like Byron, Poe has been subjected to what, in view of his high position abroad, is an astonishing amount of harsh criticism from his own countrymen.

Emerson, for example, is reported to have called the writer whom many Americans consider the greatest author yet produced in this country, "the jingle man." Poe did write The Bells, and he managed to put a great deal of their "jingling and tinkling" into his poem, or his metrical tour de force if one prefers so to designate it—but he also wrote in his youth those stanzas beginning "Helen, thy beauty is to me" which are as magically harmonious, at least in their opening, as any lines I can recall from any other American poet. This haunting, beautiful poem, to the symmetry of which Lowell paid ungrudging tribute, did not suffice to bear Poe aloft into Emerson's Parnassus but the stanzas that compose it have sung themselves a home in thousands of hearts.

Lowell, who has just been cited as a witness for the defense, must also be called by the prosecution. In famous lines, he brought Poe along with his Raven like Barnaby Rudge,

Perhaps your well-to-do citizen, after a prosperous day and a good dinner, might be inclined, with Mr. Burchell of The Vicar of Wakefie! to cry out "Fudge, fudge" on hearing some one repeat the stanza: