It would be a strained parallel to compare Poe with Chopin at all points; nevertheless, chronological coincidences are not the only comparisons that might be instituted without exaggeration. True, the roots of Chopin’s culture were more cosmopolitan, more richly nurtured than Poe’s; the poet, like an air-plant, found his spiritual sustenance from sources unknown to the America of his day. Of Poe’s intellectual ancestry, however, we may form some conception, though his learning was not profound, despite his copious quotations from half-forgotten and recondite authors, Glanvil, for example. Nevertheless, the matchless lines, “Helen, thy beauty is to me like those Nicéan barks of yore,” ... were struck off in the fire of a boyhood passion. Chopin had a careful training under the eye of his Polish teacher, Elsner; but who could have taught him how to compose his Opus 2, the Variations on Mozart’s La ci darem la mano? Both Poe and Chopin were full-fledged artists from the beginning, their individualities and limitations sharply defined. Perhaps the most exquisite music penned by Poe is this same Helen, while the first mazourka of Chopin stamps him as an original poet. In the later productions of these men there is more than a savor of morbidity. Consider the Fantaisie-Polonaise, Opus 61, with its most musical, most melancholy cadences; or the F minor Mazourka, composed during the last illness of Chopin; a sick brain betrays itself in the rhythmic insistence of the theme, a soul-weary Wherefore? In the haunting repetitions and harmonies of Ulalume there is a poetic analogue. This poem, in which sense swoons into sound, possesses a richness of color and rhythmic accent that betoken the mentality of a poet whose brain is perilously unhinged. If alcohol produced this condition, then might a grateful world erect altars to such a wondrous god of evocation. Prohibition has not thus far produced a Poe. But he wasn’t the creation of either alcohol or drugs, though they were contributory causes; they prodded his cortical cells into abnormal activity, made leap the neuronic filaments with surprising consequences. No, a profound cerebral lesion was the real reason why Poe resorted to brandy to soothe his exacerbated nerves, and not because he drank did he go to wrack and ruin. His “case” is like Baudelaire’s and E. T. W. Hoffmann’s; not to mention the names of James Clarence Mangan and Monticelli, one the singer of Dark Rosaleen, the other that master of gorgeous hues, fantasies of enchanted lands and crumbling linear designs.