Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/118

98 and unhealthy excitement about the forms and machinery of governmental action which have within the last century so absorbed their attention as to exclude in a strange degree all care of the proper results of good government—the happiness of a people—improvement in the condition of mankind—practicable under a thousand forms—and without which all forms are valueless and shadowy phantoms. It will serve also as an auxiliary in convincing mankind that the origin of the principal social evils of any given land is not to be found (except in a much less degree than we usually suppose) either in republicanism or monarchy or any especial method of government—that we must look for the source of our greatest defects in a variety of causes totally distinct from any such action—in love of gain, for example, whose direct tendency to social evil was vividly shown in an essay on American Social Elevation lately published in the "Messenger." In a word, let this book of Von Raumer's be read with attention, as a study and as a whole. If this thing be done—which is but too seldom done (here at least) in regard to works of a like character and cast—and we will answer for the result—as far as that result depends upon the deliberate and unprejudiced declaration of any well-educated man.

[Fourth edition of Poems, by William Cullen Bryant, reviewed in The Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1837. In a later review Poe says: "Mr. Longfellow is not as thorough a versifier within Mr. Bryant's limits, but a far better one upon the whole, on account of his greater range."]