But in the best of the decadents the soul survived; and if they have a place in literature it is because they have left a record of the travels of the prodigal soul in a far country. Poe, though not sharing their decadence, is also the poet of a far country. That loveliest of his poems (if we except “Annabel Lee”), “To Helen”--what is it but a triumphant cry of return? Unlike “The Raven,” it is a poem that never loses its beauty with repetition. “Annabel Lee” may be the fullest expression of his genius, but “To Helen” is the most exquisite. Even to write it down, hackneyed though it is, renews one’s delight: Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o’er the perfumed sea, The weary, way-born wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome. Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand The agate lamp within thy hand! Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Land! Here, as nowhere else, Poe achieved coherent and consummate grace of form. Here, if almost nowhere else, his talent was equal to his genius. XV HAWTHORNE Hawthorne is the only American admitted into the English Men of Letters Series. This may be partly accidental, and due to the fact that it was possible to get so fine a critic as Henry James to write about him. It also suggests, however, that in 1879 Hawthorne was held in higher esteem than he is held to-day. There are several American writers about whom we are nowadays more curious. Emerson does not soar at quite such an altitude as he once did, but he is still an indubitable figure of genius on the sunny side of the clouds. Thoreau, with the challenge of his sardonic simplicity, will interest us so long as there is a society to protest against. Poe, after we have refined him in the fiercest fires of criticism, remains gold of the most precious. Whitman holds us as the giant aborigine of democracy as well as the rhapsodist of brotherhood and death. Washington Irving, on the other hand, has disappeared except from the schoolbooks, and Oliver Wendell Holmes has ceased to be read by people under fifty. Longfellow has become an exiguous contributor to an anthology except in so far as he is taught, like Irving, to schoolchildren, and Lowell is oftener quoted by politicians than by critics of letters. There is no need to discuss just now whether this waning of reputations is likely to be permanent. It is enough to note that Hawthorne, though he has not waned to the extent that Longfellow has, has ceased for most readers to be a star of the first or second magnitude. How many critics would now place him, as he was once placed, among the great masters of English prose? How many editors of a series of lives of great writers would unhesitatingly