easy physical prowess made him the most illustrious school boy in Richmond, but he was not allowed to derive pleasure from this high eminence. His play

mates, too well trained in genealogy and taught an extravagant pride of ancestry, did not let him forget that his mother was an actress and that the privileges he enjoyed and they envied were owed to the beneficence of a Scotch merchant. These reminders of his inheritance and environment forced him into an unnatural moodiness and deprived him in large part of that frank and friendly companionship based upon a sense of total equality.

No doubt where much was said far more was understood. The sensitive boy felt himself tolerated rather than desired, suffered rather than sought. It is very probable that he exaggerated both their ill will and his own loneliness, but in this matter of sensitiveness fancy is as serious as fact. In such a mood the unselfish and frank kindness of a cordial friend deeply impressed him. All of his powers of appreciation and they were not slight were concentrated on this mother of one of his school friends. The sudden and sad death of this lady, whose courtesy he had magnified into affection, whose person his idolatrous adoration had transmuted into queenliness, hurled him from perilous heights into the abysmal depths of an artificial but intense despondency. He had known the loveliness of loving well" and had read in her death: the " symbol and token" of all misery. With her

into his

Reflec

burial was introduced into his life and later poetry the element of grave-yard brooding. tions upon death, not with forebodings of its terrors, but with reminiscences of its deprivation, filled his mind and permanently changed his temperament.

There is

no one event in his life to which so much of his poetry may be referred as the death of a beautiful young woman, and the two foci of the elliptical orbit of his poetic career are first the death of Jane Stith Stanard and, later, that of Virginia Poe.

From Richmond with its memories and its occasions of poetic expression Poe went to the University of Virginia, carrying with him his love of solitude and his moody seriousness, but coveting the solace of companionship. Escape from himself might be found in serious studies or rollicking fellowship; escape from these, when ill-suited to his mood, in long, solitary rambles in The Ragged Mountains. The new institution with its illustrious father and only less illustrious godfathers, with its novelties of feature and plan, its reminders of the Old World in architectural structure and in imported professors, must have appealed strongly to the tastes and temper of this remarkable student.

The crass contrast which was inevitable between his romantic training and the matter of fact obligations of this every-day world came when Poe was placed in Mr. Allan's counting room. The experiment and its result might both have been predicted. If Poe had not had the gift of poetry, perhaps he might have been a successful business man. Had he been less a genius, he might at least have compromised with his ideal and become part maker of verse, part maker of money. But for him there was no compromise nor could he face about at command. His training and his taste alike were averse to this occupation, and he took refuge in flight. From his Richmond imprisonment he turned naturally to the freedom symbolized by his birth. At Boston, which his mother had loved, he entered upon the career of a soldier. But before this he

had published his first volume of poetry.

It was

a small booklet of forty pages, entitled "Tamerlane and other Poems. By a Bostonian. Boston: Calvin F. S. Thomas, Printer, 1827."

This volume contained ten poems, Tamerlane, To—, Dreams, Visit of the Dead, Evening Star, Imitation, "In Youth have I Known one,' c.; "A wilder' d being from my birth," The Happiest Day, and The Lake. These poems, which Poe says were written in 18211822, were obviously rewritten or revised at a later day. It is true that Poe began to write while a school boy in Richmond and equally true that he was a versifier while at the University of Virginia in 1826. The poems show maturity of powers almost inconsistent with the earlier date and surprising even for a collegian of seventeen. Obviously the latest date possible for the composition of these poems is the most probable. The poems went to press in the spring of 1827. Poe left the University of Virginia after Dec. 20th, 1826. It is not likely that these poems were written during the short period he was chained to a desk in Richmond and even less probable that they were prepared during his wanderings from Richmond to Baltimore or Boston. If then they were not made ready for the press during these unsettled months it is very probable that he was busy with them while at the University in 1826. This view is substantiated in part by the fact that these poems show in many ways the influence of Byron, and Byron was one of Poe's college enthusiasms. But these poems have no particular reference to his Alma Mater. On the contrary the author, who always writes in the first person, assumes the rôle of a blasé man of the world and deplores the passing of his happiness and his consequent woe. The brightness of his past life

was a joyous dream, the misery of his present living due to the rude awakening. No explanation of his happiness or loss is clearly vouchsafed, but it is obvious that it associates itself with a grave around which even the Spirits of the Dead hover. "Pride and power mingle in all his youthful dreams, but Tamerlane tells with deep regret how ambition for these killed love. In The Lake there is the only hint to be found in Poe's poems of voluntary death as a coveted and legitimate exit from these earthly worries. In spite of the pathetic sadness of these unnatural meditations of a premature youth, the luxury of grief," the interest he has in wearing his own deep feeling as a crown, "lessen our sympathy for his suffering. It all seems but a dream within a dream." Yet Poe incidentally gives us the key to his own failure, for he trusted to the fire within for light" and missed the clearer and steadier light of the world's best experience.

Enlisted as a private in the United States army, he enjoyed at least the diversions of removal from fort to fort. His duties may have been irksome but they were so faithfully performed as to merit the commendation of his commanding officer. He must have seen his superiority in mental ability and culture to his comrades in arms and it was no doubt this more than military ambition that led him to desire to be ranked among the officers. To this end he wished to enter West Point and therefore withdrew from the army in January, 1829. While waiting impatiently for the slow and, in his case, halting processes of appointment, he issued through Hatch & Dunning, Baltimore, a volume of seventy-one pages, entitled "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe."

The chief addition in this volume is " Al Aaraaf."

This poem is peculiarly puzzling. Its musical phrases, particularly its euphonious collocations of almost meaningless words, its ready and reasonless improvisations, mark its author as surpassingly skilful. But what does it mean, what is its purpose ? Are those right who think it a mere exercise in metrical manipulation, with no higher purpose than beauty of sound? Was Poe deliberately perpetrating a huge hoax, challenging the wits to vain attempts at solving that which has no solution? Or, are we to take the poem more seriously? Fruit, in his very valuable study of Poe's poetry thinks Poe here intends to teach, if he ever intended to teach anything, that Beauty is to be ranked above Love. Poe was hardly inferior to Keats in his love of the beautiful and this may be construed as "his championship of objective Beauty." For this volume he entirely revised "Tamerlane, " in which he is the champion of Love as against Power.

Besides the revisions of earlier poems there are a few new ones, but these add little either in variety of theme or treatment.

West Point with its wearying routine, its unending round of compulsory details grew far more tiresome than the daily demands upon a private or non-commissioned officer in the regular army. His neglect of the technical regulations and his inattention to strict requirements led in a short while to his dismissal. There was nothing in this brief experience in a Military Academy to cultivate the art of poetry, but, nevertheless, the volume of 1831 furnished several things new and effective. These novelties were not the lines of sarcasm and scorn directed in rude jest against his instructors and betraying rather his rebellious mood than

1 "The Mind and Art of Poe."-John Phelps Fruit.