It sparkles along the current of history, and under its warm
smile deserts blossom like the rose.
And Poe? With a mind neither well balanced nor unprejudiced, and an
imagination that mistook the distorted fantasies of a fevered brain for
the pure impulses of some mysterious muse, and gave the reins to
coursers that even Phaeton would have feared to trust, he can only
excite our pity where he desires our admiration. _Qui non dat quod amat,
non accipit ille quod optat_, was an inscription on an old chequer-board
of the times of Henry II. And what did Poe love? Truth shrugs her
shoulders, but forbears to answer,--Himself. His were the vagaries of
genius without its large-hearted charities; its nice discrimination
without its honesty of purpose; its startling originality without its
harmonious proportions; its inevitable errors without its persevering
energies. He acknowledged no principle; he was actuated by no high aim;
he even busied himself--as so many of the unfortunate great have
done--with no chimera. From a mind so highly cultured, an organization
so finely strung, we expected the rarest blossoms, the divinest
melodies. The flowers lie before us, mere buds, from which the green
calyx of immaturity has not yet curled, and in whose cold heart the
perfume is not born; the melodies vibrate around us, matchless in
mechanism, wondrous in miraculous accord, but as destitute of the _soul_
of harmony as the score of Beethoven's sonata in A flat to unlearned
eyes.
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