Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/497

Rh writers in the South to follow in his footsteps, and rapidly romances of the same general type, with Southern incidents as their basis, came into existence. The foremost antebellum writers of fiction in the South were Poe, Simms, Kennedy, and Cooke. Of these the last three are to be grouped together as representing the interest in writing historical romances. Poe stands apart from these in the methods and ideals followed in his tales.

It has been so long popular to think of Poe as "a world artist, unrelated to his local origin, unindebted to it," that it may seem almost absurd to look for any representation of Southern life in Poe's stories. Nevertheless, so distinguished a critic as Professor Woodberry holds that Poe is as much a product of the South as Whittier was of New England. As he puts it, "His breeding and education were Southern; his manners, habits of thought, and moods of feeling were Southern; his sentimentalism, his conception of womanhood and its qualities, of manhood and its behavior, his weaknesses of character, have the stamp of his origin; his temperament, even his sensibilities, his gloom and dream, his response to color and music, were of his race and place."

This story, first published in 1839, is generally accepted as, from the point of view of craftsmanship, Poe's finest tale.

ennuyé: wearied, bored.—Von Weber: A German composer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.—Fuseli: a Swiss artist who lived from 1742 to 1825, and who painted a series of imaginative pictures illustrating Shakespeare and Milton.—"The Haunted Palace": the allegorical significance is plainly hinted at. The word Porphyrogene in line 22 of the poem on page 38 is formed from two Greek words, meaning "purple" and "begotten"; hence born in the purple, royal.

Watson, etc.: these are the names of obscure scientists, more prominent in Poe's day than in the present.—Satyrs and Ægipans: in classical mythology the satyrs were creatures with the body of a man and the feet, hair, and horns of a goat; ægipans is an epithet of Pan, the satyr-like rural god.—Gothic: the black-letter type of the Middle Ages.—Vigiliæ Mortuorum, etc.: "Vigils for the Dead according to the