Marginalia, Part V [pp. 600-601]

600 Marginalia. [SEPTEMBER,
if, contrary to all probability, I should survive
Madame Colet, the copy of the Letters of Ben jamin Constant is to be restored to me, and will
again become my property." "The writing ap proved 17th July, 1840.
(Signed,) J. RECAMIER.."
I have attentively read the long published re ports of this trial, and have not now, after read ing the decision of the court, any thing to re tract. Such letters should not be made public:
but I believe that Madame R. intended their pub lication, and that Girardin has the right to pub lish them, if he chooses to exercise it. He is not
a man to let the affair drop where it is.
W. W. M.
by; ~MARGINALIA.
BY EDGAR A. POE.
Among our men of genius whom, because
they are men of genius, we neglect, let me not
fail to mention William Wallace, of Kentucky.
Had Mr. W. been born under the wings of that
ineffable buzzard, "The North American Re view," his unusual merits would long ago have
been blazoned to the world-as the far inferior
merits of Sprague, Dana, and others of like cal ibre, have already been blazoned. Neither of
these gentlemen has written a poem worthy to
be compared with "The Chaunt of a Soul,"
published in " The Union Magazine" for Novem ber, 1848. It is a noble composition through out-imaginative, eloquent, full of dignity, and
well sustained. It abounds in detached images
of high merit-for example:
Your early splendor's gone
Like stars into a cloud withdrawn Like music laid asleep
In dried up fountains.
Enough, I am, and shall not choose to die.
No matter what our future Fate may be,
To live, is in itself a majesty.
And Truth, arising from yon deep,
Is plain as a white statue on a tall, dark steep.
-Then
The Earth and Heaven were fair,
While only less than Gods seemed all my fellow men.
Oh, the delight-the gladness Thle sense, yet love, of madness The glorious choral exultations The far-off sounding of the banded nations
The wings of angels in melodious sweeps
Uplon the mountain's hazy steeps The very dead astir within their coffined deeps The dreamy veil that wrapt the star and sod A swathe of purple, gold, and amethyst And, luminous behind the billowy mist,
Something that looked to my young eyes like God.
I admit that the defect charged, by an envious
critic, upon Bayard Taylor-the sin of excessive
rhetoricianism-is, in some measure, chargeable
to Wallace. He, now and then, permits enthusiasm to hurry him into bombast; but at this
point he is rapidly improving; and, if not disheartened by the cowardly neglect of those who
dare not praise a poetical aspirant with genius
and without influence, will soon rank as one of
the very noblest of American poets. In fact, he
is so now.
"Frequently since his recent death," says the
American Editor of Hood, "he has been called
a great author-a phrase used not inconsiderately
or in vain." Yet, if we adopt the conventional
idea of " a great author," there has lived, perhaps, no writer of the last half century who,
with equal notoriety, was less entitled than Hood
to be so called. In fact, he was a literary merchant, whose main stock in trade was littleness;
for, during the larger portion of his life, he
seemed to breathe only for the purpose of perpetrating puns-things of so despicable a platitude
that the man who is capable of habitually committing them, is seldom found capable of anything else. Whatever merit may be discovered
in a pun, arises altogether from unexpectedness.
This is the pun's element and is two-fold. First,
we demand that the combination of the pun be
unexpected; and, secondly, we require the most
entire unexpectedness in the pun per se. A rare
pun, rarely appearing, is, to a certain extent, a
pleasurable effect; but to no mind, however debased in taste, is a continuous effort at punning
otherwise than unendurable. The man who
maintains that he derives gratification from any
such chapters of punnage as Hood was in the
daily practice of committing to paper, should not
be credited upon oath.
The puns of the author of " Fair Inez," however, are to be regarded as the weak points of
the man. Independently of their ill effect, in a
literary view, as mere puns, they leave upon us
a painful impression; for too evidently they are
the hypochondriac's struggles at mirth-the grinnings of the death's head- No one can read his
"Literary Reminiscence; without being convinced of his habitual despondency: —and the
species of false wit in question is precisely of
that character which would be adopted by an
author of Hood's temperament and cast of intel
Marginalia.
[ SEPTEMBER,
600