Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/58

 have been heaped upon his name and the most improbable and calumnious stories recorded as veritable histories. Ten years have passed since his death, and while the popular interest in his writings and the popular estimate of his genius increases from year to year, these acknowledged calumnies are still going the round of the foreign periodicals and are still being republished at home.

We believe that with the exception of Mr. Willis’s generous tributes to his memory, some candid and friendly articles by the Editor of the Literary Messenger, and an eloquent and vigorous article in Russell’s Magazine by Mr. J. Wood Davidson, of Columbia, S. C. (who has appreciated his genius and his sorrow more justly perhaps than any of his American critics) this great and acknowledged wrong to the dead has been permitted to pass without public rebuke or protest.

In the memoir prefixed to the Illustrated Poems, it is said of him that “his religion was a worship of the beautiful,” which is emphatically true, and that “he knew no beauty but that which is purely sensuous,”