Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/41

 often acknowledge the refined art, the tact, the subtlety, the faultless method, while the potent magnetism of his genius utterly escapes them. There are persons whom nature has made nonconductors to this sort of electricity.

The critic of the "North American" to whose strictures we have alluded, charges him with overlooking moral and spiritual ideas, and calls his works “rich and elaborate pieces of art,” wanting in “the vis vitea which alone can make of words living things.” Bayne, on the other hand, in his fine essay on “Tennyson and his Teachers,” alludes to the “Haunted Palace” of “the great American poet,” and contrasts its wonderfully spiritual, subjective, and ideal character with the rich and accurate detail of Tennyson’s “Palace of Art.” He classes the American poet with those who have scattered imaginative spells rather than finished elaborate imaginative pictures. A greater mistake in literary criticism could not well be made than that which is evinced in the frequent application of the word “