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Sarah Helen Whitman.

BORN in Providence, R. I., 1803. DIED there, 1878.

THE PORTRAIT.

[Poems by Sarah Helen Whitman. 1879.]

AFT

FTER long years I raised the folds concealing That face, magnetic as the morning's beam: While slumbering memory thrilled at its revealing, Like Memnon wakening from his marble dream.

Again I saw the brow's translucent pallor,

The dark hair floating o'er it like a plume;
The sweet, imperious mouth, whose haughty valor
Defied all portents of impending doom.

Eyes planet-calm, with something in their vision
That seemed not of earth's mortal mixture born,
Strange mythic faiths and fantasies Elysian,
And far, sweet dreams of "faery lands forlorn."

Unfathomable eyes that held the sorrow

Of vanished ages in their shadowy deeps,
Lit by that prescience of a heavenly morrow
Which in high hearts the immortal spirit keeps.

Oft has that pale, poetic presence haunted
My lonely musings at the twilight hour,
Transforming the dull earth-life it enchanted,
With marvel and with mystery and with power.

Oft have I heard the sullen sea-wind moaning
Its dirge-like requiems on the lonely shore,
Or listening to the autumn woods intoning
The wild, sweet legend of the lost Lenore;

Oft in some ashen evening of October,

Have stood entranced beside a moldering tomb

Hard by that visionary Lake of Auber,

Where sleeps the shrouded form of Ulalume;

Oft in chill, star-lit nights have heard the chiming

Of far-off mellow bells on the keen air,

And felt their molten-golden music timing

To the heart's pulses, answering unaware.

Sweet, mournful eyes, long closed upon earth's sorrow, Sleep restfully after life's fevered dream!

1870.

Sleep, wayward heart! till on some cool, bright morrow,
Thy soul, refreshed, shall bathe in morning's beam.

Though cloud and sorrow rest upon thy story,
And rude hands lift the drapery of thy pall,
Time, as a birthright, shall restore the glory,
And Heaven rekindle all the stars that fall.

THE SHADOW-LAND OF POE.

[Edgar Poe and His Critics. 1860.]

WHILE the author of Eureka, like Lucretius,

-"dropped his plummet down the broad,

Deep Universe and found no God,"

his works are, as if unconsciously, filled with an overwhelming sense of the power and majesty of Deity; they are even dark with reverential awe. His proud intellectual assumption of the supremacy of the individual soul was but an expression of its imperious longings for immortality and its recoil from the haunting phantasms of death and annihilation; while the theme of all his more imaginative writings is, as we have said, a love that survives the dissolution of the mortal body and oversweeps the grave. His mental and temperamental idiosyncrasies fitted him to come readily into rapport with psychal and spiritual influences. Many of his strange narratives had a degree of truth in them which he was unwilling to avow. In one of this class he makes the narrator say, "I cannot even now regard these experiences as a dream, yet it is difficult to say how otherwise they should be termed. Let us suppose only that the soul of man, to-day, is on the brink of stupendous psychal discoveries." Dante tells us that

-" minds dreaming near the dawn Are of the truth presageful."

Edgar Poe's dreams were assuredly often presageful and significant, and while he but dimly apprehended through the higher reason the truths which they foreshadowed, he riveted public attention upon them by the strange fascination of his style, the fine analytical temper of his intellect, and, above all, by the weird splendors of his imagination, compelling men to read and to accredit as possible truths his most marvellous conceptions. He often spoke of the imageries and incidents of his inner life as more vivid and veritable than those of his

outer experience. We find in some pencilled notes appended to a manuscript copy of one of his later poems the words, "All that I have here expressed was actually present to me. Remember the mental condition which gave rise to 'Ligeia '-recall the passage of which I spoke, and observe the coincidence." With all the fine alchemy of his subtle intellect he sought to analyze the character and conditions of this introverted life. "I regard these visions," he says, "even as they arise, with an awe which in some measure moderates or tranquillizes the ecstasy-I so regard them through a conviction that this ecstasy, in itself, is of a character supernal to the human nature is a glimpse of the spirit's outer world." He had that constitutional determination to reverie which, according to De Quincey, alone enables a man to dream magnificently, and which, as we have said, made his dreams realities and his life a dream. His mind was indeed a "Haunted Palace," echoing to the footfalls of angels and demons. "No man," he says, "has recorded, no man has dared to record, the wonders of his inner life."

Is there, then, no significance in this "supernatural soliciting"? Is there no evidence of a wise purpose, an epochal fitness, in the appearance, at this precise era, of a mind so rarely gifted, and accessible from peculiarities of psychal and physical organization to the subtle vibrations of an ethereal medium conveying but feeble impressions to the senses of ordinary persons; a mind which, "following darkness like a dream," wandered forever with insatiate curiosity on the confines of that

-"wild, weird clime, that lieth sublime
Out of Space, out of Time!

By each spot the most unholy,
In each nook most melancholy,"

seeking to solve the problem of that phantasmal Shadow-Land, which, through a class of phenomena unprecedented in the world's history, was about to attest itself as an actual plane of conscious and progressive life, the mode and measure of whose relations with our own are already recognized as legitimate objects of scientific research by the most candid. and competent thinkers of our time? We assume that, in the abnormal manifestations of a genius so imperative and so controlling, this epochal significance is most strikingly apparent. Jean Paul says truly that "there is more poetic fitness, more method, a more intelligible purpose in the biographies which God Almighty writes than in all the inventions of poets and novelists "

William Croswell.

BORN in Hudson, N. Y., 1804. DIED in Boston, Mass., 1851.

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Charles Frederick Briggs.

BORN in Nantucket, Mass., 1804. DIED in Brooklyn, N. Y., 1877.

PETER FUNK'S REVENGE.

[The Knickerbocker Magazine. 1846.]

WALKING down Broadway a few mornings since, I discovered a

man stationed opposite a store which had a small red flag hanging at the door, with a large muslin banner, impended from a tall staff, which he held, on which was inscribed this strange device: "BEWARE OF MOCK AUCTIONS!" Upon inquiry, I learned that this was intended as a caution to Peter Funk, and a warning to strangers not to part with their money without getting its full value in return. Upon farther inquiry, I learned that this ingenious and benevolent enterprise had been suggested by His Honor the Mayor, who in many other ways has entitled himself to the gratitude of our citizens.

I had often heard of Peter Funk, but had never seen the gentleman, and having a curiosity that way, determined to make the acquaintance of so noted a person. I accordingly entered the store, and saw a person dressed in very good style, with a satin scarf and gold chain, standing behind a counter, with a small hammer in his hand. He was a young

man, with an air of the most entire self-satisfaction, and nothing seemed to give him any uneasiness excepting the "Beware!" on the side-walk, which not only kept bidders from entering the store, but caused a crowd of gaping idlers and ragged news-boys to collect around his door. He had watches, chains, and other trinkets, which he seemed anxious to sell to the highest bidder, but nobody would bid.

In one of the pauses of his continuous and commingled exhortations to the crowd "to walk in and secure a great bargain," I asked him if he was a regularly-licensed auctioneer, and was told that he was, and that furthermore, he had always conducted his business in the most honorable manner, and could produce first-rate recommendations from his last employer. This might be true or it might not, but Mr. Funk impressed me with the idea that he was an ill-used gentleman. If Mr. Funk enjoyed any immunities to commit crime, like Mr. Nobody, and other personages who are often spoken of but never seen, it would be very just in our civic Aristides to warn the public against his malpractices. But Mr. Funk assured me that he was amenable to the laws, like any other merchant, and that he wouldn't grumble at paying the penalty of any crime of which he might be convicted; and he thought it a little peculiar, to say the least of it, that he should be selected out from among the fra

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