The culture of Chopin was not of a finer stamp than Poe’s, nor was his range so wide. In their intellectual sympathies both were rather narrow, though intense to an emotional poignancy, and both were remarkable in mood-versatility. Born aristocrats, purple raiment became them well. Both were sadly deficient in planturous humor and the Attic salt that conserves the self-mockery of Heine. Irony they possessed to a superlative degree. Both created rhythmic beauty, evoked the charm of evanescence. A crepuscular art; the notations of twilit souls and the “October of the sensations.” Both were at their best in smaller artistic forms. When either one spreads his pinions for symphonic flight we think of Matthew Arnold’s interpretation of Shelley: “beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” Which phrase truly is of Mat’s own making, yet somehow misses the essential Shelley. Poe and Chopin supremely mastered their intellectual instruments. Artificers in precious cameos, they are of an artistic consanguinity because of their extraordinary absorption in the Beautiful. Poe wrote in English, but was he really as American as Hawthorne and Emerson were American? His verse and prose depict characters and landscapes that belong to No Man’s Land, in that mystic region east of the sun, west of the moon. The American scene was unsympathetic to him, and he refused to become even morally acclimated. His Eldorado is “over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of the shadow.” His creations are bodiless; shadow of shadows, the incarnation of Silence, set forth in spectral speech. Unlike any other native-born writer, he sounds better in a French garb; the Baudelaire translations improve his style, and Stéphane Mallarmé has accomplished an almost miraculous transposition of Ulalume. (The Raven--Le Corbeau--by the same master I do not care for as much, and with its refrain, “Jamais plus!” is not so musically sonorous as “Nevermore!”)