Fiends controlled it, (Let him hold it!) Devils held for me the inkstand and the pen; Now the days of grace are o’er, (Ah, Lenore!) I am but as other men: What is time, time, time, To my rare and runic rhyme, To my random, reeling rhyme, By the sands along the shore, Where the tempest whispers, “Pay him!” and I answer “Nevermore!” GALAHAD: What do you mean by the reference to Horace Greeley? ZOïLUS: I thought everybody had heard that Greeley’s only autograph of Poe was a signature to a promissory note for fifty dollars. He offers to sell it for half the money. Now, I don’t mean to be wicked, and to do nothing with the dead except bone ’em, but when such a cue pops into one’s mind, what is one to do? THE ANCIENT: O, I think you’re still within decent limits! There was a congenital twist about poor Poe. We can’t entirely condone his faults, yet we stretch our charity so as to cover as much as possible. His poetry has a hectic flush, a strange, fascinating, narcotic quality, which belongs to him alone. Baudelaire and Swinburne after him have been trying to surpass him by increasing the dose; but his Muse is the natural Pythia, inheriting her convulsions, while they eat all sorts of insane roots to produce theirs. GALAHAD (_eagerly_): Did you ever know him? THE ANCIENT: I met him two or three times, heard him lecture once (his enunciation was exquisite), and saw him now and then in Broadway,――enough to satisfy me that there were two men in him: one, a refined gentleman, an aspiring soul, an artist among those who had little sense of literary art; the other―― ZOïLUS: Go on! THE ANCIENT: “Built his nest with the birds of night.” No more of that! _Diversions of the Echo Club._ By Bayard Taylor (John Camden Hotten, London.) ―――――――― “THE AGER.” This clever parody, by Prof. J. P. Stelle, editor of the _Progressive Farmer_, and of the agricultural department of the Mobile _Register_, has been repeatedly published in United States newspapers, though generally in a mutilated form. The following is believed to be the correct version:―― Once upon an evening bleary, While I sat me dreamy, dreary, In the sunshine, thinking over Things that passed in days of yore; While I nodded, nearly sleeping, Gently came a something creeping Up my back, like water seeping―― Seeping upward from the floor. “’Tis a cooling breeze,” I muttered, From the regions ’neath the floor―― Only this, and nothing more.”