the room. The Doctor, when he was left alone, sat down upon it and looked around him. What was he to do? Nothing. There was nothing to do, to-day, or ever. He got up and looked out of the window at the pig rooting in its trough, and then sat down again. It seemed as if he had been looking at that pig for hours.

There was a queer faintness at his heart or was it his stomach? Once he thought he smelled Sally's coffee and hot cakes. But that, too, went away. He slept awhile, nodding until he nearly fell. If he only could lie down on the bed! He sprang up thinking he heard Frederica calling him. But she was not there. He went to the window and looked out at the pig again.

After an hour there was a knock at the door. Miss Wynn stood there, with an

amiable smile on her face which she always wore when on duty.

"I think it best to tell you," she said, "that a person calling herself Mrs. Paull, with two children, came to see you early this morning. I refused her admission, telling her that our rules permitted visitors only twice in the week. On Monday and Thursday afternoons. For two hours. This is Friday. I wish you also to understand the rules. It will perhaps save trouble." She went out and closed the door.

The old man lay down on the floor. He was very tired.

Then he jumped up and walked up and down. What had he to complain of? He had everything necessary for him until the end came, food and a place to sleep. Everything. He stretched out his arms.

How

empty the world was! This was old age, was it? No standing room for him among men any more.

Presently he called out aloud: "Frederica." And after a minute, "Molly! Little Molly!"

And just then he heard doors bang below, and heavy footsteps on the stairs and Clara's shrill voice in protest, and then the door opened and a gray-haired man came rushing in and kneeled down, and took him up in his arms and hugged him, crying out, "Dad! Why, Dad!"

"Tom!" the old man cried. He had not seen tears in that boy's eyes for years. "I'm all right, Tom!”

And then Joe, the Doctor, suddenly turned up and, as usual, filled the room. Joe was a short, stout, red-headed fellow, always laughing and full of jokes. He was not laughing now. "Here! Hold him up higher, Tom. Drink this, sir. He's all right. Where are his shoes?" Then he got down on his knees and put on the shoes of course, on the wrong feet. "Good! Now you're ready. Frederica has the carry-all at the door. Yes, of course the children are with her. How did we know? She wired us and we caught the express. Now, Tom, take the other side."

They were very quiet as they drove home. The thing had been a shock to them, and they were common-place folk, not used to shocks nor given to much expression of feeling. Frederica cried quietly to herself and held the old man's lean hand tight in both of her own.

Tom watched him all the way. It never had occurred to him until now that some day he would lose his father altogether. Some day he would have to live in a world where that old man was not, and never could come again. As he thought of this all the blood went out of his rough, kind face. When they reached the house he took the Doctor in his arms and carried him to the door. He wanted to tell him how he had loved him all these years, and would care for him now as son had never cared for father before. But he only said to him to go in to the fire and eat something at once. The old man looked at him and understood. The light came to his eyes, and he held up his head and marched into the house more briskly than he had done for years.

Old Sally had a little table ready by the

fire. "Sit down, sit down, sah," she ordered. "De soup's bilin' hot an' de chicken's done to a turn. Yoh must lose no time."

"That's right," cried Joe, bustling in. "Sally's the doctor you want now, Dad."

While the Doctor (and of course the children) were still busy with the chicken, Parr's hack passed, going out of town. Mrs. Cross was in the front seat, brassbuttoned jacket, red pompon and all. She cast a martial triumphant look around. Had not to-day's Morning Press given a full-page picture of her in her military attire with the heading in large caps, "Oakford's Foremost Lady Philanthropist leaves us to-day." Below was a sketch of her life, the facts furnished yesterday by herself to a reporter. She had ordered twenty copies of the paper to be sent to her friends in the East. After all, she was going home victorious.

The Doctor saw her pass and looked after her with a shrewd smile. Then he settled back in his big chair with the children at his feet. Frederica behind them touched some soft, low chords on the piano. Tom had brought his papers into the next room, and now and then came to the door just to nod gayly to his father. And Joe, between his patients, ran in to gossip a minute.

The story of the Doctor's kidnapping by Mrs. Cross was circulating by this time through the village. Nobody liked to intrude to-day on the old man, but one neighbor after another sent some little greeting to him; a book which they "were sure he would like," a plate of his favorite crullers, or a bunch of late chrysanthemums out of their gardens. Many of them wrote little notes full of jokes and of their affection for him. Even old Dr. Hyde, the President of the College, came limping over to bring a basket of his famous Winter pears.

It grew very still. The snow fell steadily and the fire gleamed, red and clear. Frederica's music stopped. She motioned to Tom that his father was asleep.

But the Doctor never had been more awake and alive. A strange new idea had suddenly come to him. Was this the Old Age that he had dreaded so long? It was as if he stood on a little isthmus between this world and the other, and all about him were his friends waiting for him to go away. They held out eager hands to keep him here. How kind everybody had been since he was seventy! He had not thought

of it before, but now he remembered how during the last year or two, all the people he knew in the world had taken care of him-black and white, bad and good, just as if they were his blood kin.

Mrs. Cross?

He laughed. "Well, she meant it for the best," he said, making a wry face; and then thought no more about her.

For suddenly there came to him the thought of that other country to which he was going. The old man covered his eyes with his hand. His lips moved for a long time, but

he spoke no word. A great peace came slowly into his worn old face, and he began to plan little things that he could do now for Frederica and the boys and the children. "I must go to work at once," he thought, "for the time here is short!"

The snow fell steadily all afternoon, and the fire glowed red and warm. As the old Doctor sat and thought over his little plans, the world seemed to him only a big friendly home, and the world beyond death, which he had feared so much, just another, more friendly and more real.

HERE is no more effective way of realizing the distinction of Poe's genius than by imagining American literature without him. One is tempted to add there is no other way. It is in the historic rather than in the critical estimate that his eminence appears. It owes more to its isolation than to its quality. He was extremely individual, the entire character of his mind and nature is acutely, almost painfully, certainly perversely, personal; but his originality appears chiefly in relief against the background of his environment. His figure acquires outline and edge from its contrast with the prevailing Philistine screen which he sedulously placed behind it and on which he made it the business of his life to cast the sharpest possible shadow. There is a whole literature of revolt in older countries. Our only Ishmael is Poe. But if not unprecedented in the history of letters, he was sufficiently salient among us, and the fact that so generally his hand was against every man accentuated his individuality in the natural course of apology and polemic. The established was with us still the moral and the didactic. Poe's antagonism instinctively inclined him to art. He is in fact the solitary artist of our elder literature. This is his distinction and will remain such. Hawthorne is in a degree a rival, but in form rather than in fond, as his addiction to allegory attests, and in any case his puritan pre-occupation with the moral forces invalidates his purely æsthetic appeal. Poe's art was unalloyed. It was scrupulously devoid, at any rate, of any aim except that of producing an effect, and generally overspread if only occasionally clothed with the integument of beauty. As such it was in America at the time an exotic. His great service to his country is in a word the domestication of the exotic. Color, rhythm, space, strangeness were his "reals"; they fascinated his mind and took possession of his else unoccupied soul. In the large sense thus his art is in strictness to be called exotic rather than original. French, German, VOL. XLV.-9

English romanticism had preceded him. In the matter of literary phase, his most convinced admirer and most thorough-going apologist observes that he came at the close of an epoch, he did not introduce one. But in his hands the method and even the material that he adopted resulted in a very striking body of work, which still has the compactness and definition of a monument. Incarnated in the vivid forms his pronounced individuality imagined, illustrated by the energy of his genius, the spirit of romanticism entered the portals of our literature and illuminated its staid precincts to the end of variety at the very least. Whatever her responsibility for the subsequent riot there, her vivifying influence is clear, and for it we are indebted to Poe.

II

THE artist, by definition, exercises his activity in exclusive concentration on his effect. In so far as his attention swerves from that he modifies his distinctive attitude. Poe's never wandered a moment, even in his poetry. Now the effect in poetry is largely a matter of technic, and a great deal of poetry is naturally over-valued, because it answers the technical test; because, in short, it sounds well. In the first place its technic is so difficult that, when it is achieved with any distinction, when, so to speak, it is "pulled off" at all, it is rewarded with at least the temporary appreciation that inevitably rewards the tour de force. Much of the admiration of Poe's poetry is of this kind. Much of his poetry itself can be admired in no other way. Moreover, the technic of poetry is so multifarious, so full of possibilities, so capable of producing pleasure by mere rhyme and rhythm, that for many readers at all times and for all readers at some times its content is lost sight of. English literature has a wonderful example of this in Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Swinburne is incomparable, but Poe has something-a tithe-of the same richness of rhythmic resource,

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though his numbers are artificial at times and at times tenuous to a degree that removes them from even superficial classification with the opulent spontaneity and splendor of the English poet's diction. They are, too, more exclusively, as well as less richly, technical, leaning thus all the more heavily on technic. And his technic, being thus the main factor of Poe's verse, lacks a little the native felicity only to be secured by keeping its true relative position. Forced out of its proper subordination it loses its grace as a contributing element of a larger entity. It instead of the subject being the poet's main concern, its theoretic quality becomes obvious. It acquires a positively notional air with Poe at times-the air of illustrating the notions of his negligible "Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle." Its resources seem devices. Every effect seems due to an expedient. The repetend and the refrain are reliances with him—not instrumental but thematic. At least they constitute rather than create the effect-which has therefore something otiose and perfunctory about it. Technic of all sorts interested Poe tremendously. He had what might be called the technical temperament a variety perhaps more familiar than widely recognized. It is the temperament that delights in terminology, labels, little boxes and drawers, definitions, catalogues, categories, all ingeniously, that is to say, mechanically, apposite and perfectly rigid. It illustrates the passion for order run to seed-activity of mind avoiding the drudgery of thought by definiteness of classification. Manner being more susceptible of classification than matter, how the thing is done interests it more than the thing itself. Such a temperament on larger lines than common, with a certain sweep as well as system, Poe possessed. It rose to the pitch of positive genius with him. He pondered, himself, and lectured his contemporaries on how literature should be written, how a tale should be presented, how a poem should be built up. His criticism is largely, almost exclusively, technical. He pursued it quite in the detective spirit. His review of "Barnaby Rudge," of which to Dickens's amazement he divined the dénouement, is worthy of M. Dupin and is historic. His long criticisms of Cooper and Hawthorne are craftsman's criticism. And as such

they are extraordinarily good. They contrast refreshingly with the general run of literary praise and blame in his day-and in ours-in being specific, pointed and competent, and avoiding the vague, the sentimental and the commonplaces of moralizing, though of course they have none of the over-tones, so to say, of either culture or philosophic depth that enrich criticism as well as give it a creative value. His own craftsmanship considered strictly as such is excellent. He proceeds with perfect selfpossession and deliberation, and there is this to be said for his philosophizings about it, that at least they disclosed his own method and show conclusively that his art was an art of calculation and not the spontaneous expression of a weird and gruesome genius that it seems to so many upon whom it produces its carefully prepared effect.

His theory of poetry is stated within his account of the composition of "The Raven," which is as a whole probably in no better faith than the anonymously published editorial reference to the poem that accompanied it on its appearance. Both are mystifications which if "The Raven" were finer would tend to vulgarize it, and are only saved by being possibly derisory from being actually as risible as Mrs. Browning found the poem itself. But the theory advocated and illustrated by Poe is undoubtedly as sincere as his perverse pursuit of originality at any cost and his temperamental revolt against what is staple and standard, not to speak of what is classic, would permit. It is briefly that poetry has absolutely nothing to do with truth (to which he had an intellectual repugnance), that it is concerned solely with beauty (which he does not define, but assumes, in opposition to more conventional opinion from Plato to Keats, to be absolutely divorced from truth), and that its highest expression is the note of sadnessthe sadder the better. Of these notions only the last need arrest attention. It is true that the most perfect beauty has often the note of sadness. The reason probably resides rather in its effect than in its constitution, being largely the recipient's subjective appreciation reacting even in, or especially in, the presence of perfection which contrasts so bitterly with

"The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.”