Furthermore, all allowance being made for the tragic outcome of Poe’s career, for the part of his fate which was not the outgrowth of his own character, or could not, humanly considered, be attributed at some point in his development to his own will, his poetry is not uplifting. True, in his handling of material he is, in the ordinary acceptation, entirely clean. That is, he is wholly free from obscenity, as he is free also from that more perilous seeming cleanness which so often cloaks real impurity. Nevertheless may he be dangerous food for those whom he most readily attracts. Poe is essentially pessimistic, hopeless, toward general human experience. His favourite topic is death; and his vision does not pierce beyond the worm and the grave. Nay, like his predecessors in England and on the Continent, he luxuriates in the tomb and the charnel. As in his stories, so in his verse, though less patently, he follows some of the most pernicious motives in art that the older civilisation afforded his age. And it is the lethal progeny--Baudelaire and the rest--of that movement in European literature typified by Ann Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis that has been quickest to take up with Poe and exploit him abroad. We may seek to explain and exculpate him; we may sorrow for his blighted life; but the fact remains that what Poe wrote sprang out of his career, hence, on the whole, was morbid. The flowers of his poetry are the flowers of Lethe. The stimulants with which he catches the reader are violent and exciting. His ideal of intellectual beauty was detached and unnatural. It is little wonder, then, that he would not enter into sympathy with the English poet by whom the normal Bryant was inspired, and whose works, the most normalising and healthful influence that American literature thus far has felt, were purposely reactive against artificial and abnormal stimulation.