prophecy many years before it had become a battle-cry of criticism: The defenders of this pitiable stuff [he wrote] uphold it on the ground of its truthfulness. Taking the thesis into question, this truthfulness is the one overwhelming defect. An original idea that--to laud the accuracy with which the stone is hurled that knocks us in the head. A little less accuracy might have left us more brains. And here are critics absolutely commending the truthfulness with which the disagreeable is conveyed! In my view, if an artist must paint decayed cheeses, his merit will lie in their looking as little like decayed cheeses as possible. Of this wise doctrine Poe was always a loyal exponent. The strange veiled country in which he placed the shadows of his creation lay not within the borders of the United States. He was the child neither of his land nor of his century. Dwelling among men who have always worshipped size, he believed that there was no such thing as a long poem. A fellow-citizen of bustling men, he refused to bend the knee to industry. "Perseverance is one thing," said he, "genius quite another." And it is not surprising that he lived and died without great honour in his own country. Even those of his colleagues who guarded the dignity of their craft with a zeal equal to his own, shrank from the pitiless logic of his analysis. They loved his work as little as they respected his life. They judged him by a censorious standard which took no account of genius. And Poe shared with dignity and without regret the common fate of prophets. If he is still an exile in American esteem, he long since won the freedom of the larger world. He has been an inspiration to France, the inspirer of the nations. He did as much as any one of his contemporaries to mould the literary art of our day, and in the prose of Baudelaire and Mallarme he lives a life whose lustre the indifference of his compatriots will never dim.