TO HELEN

  Helen, thy beauty is to me
    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
  That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
    The weary, way-worn 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!

It is the tendency of the young poet that impresses us.  Here is no “withering scorn,” no heart “blighted” ere it has safely got into its teens, none of the drawing-room sans-culottism which Byron had brought into vogue.  All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the Greek Helicon in it.  The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable.  It is not of that kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of the fingers.  It is of that finer sort which the inner ear alone can estimate.  It seems simple, like a Greek column, because of its perfection.  In a poem named “Ligeia,” under which title he intended to personify the music of nature, our boy-poet gives us the following exquisite picture: 

  Ligeia!  Ligeia! 
    My beautiful one,
  Whose harshest idea
    Will to melody run,
  Say, is it thy will,
    On the breezes to toss,
  Or, capriciously still,
    Like the lone albatross,
  Incumbent on night,
    As she on the air,
  To keep watch with delight
    On the harmony there?

John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too long capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similar passages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.

Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius.  No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power.  Let talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such magnetism.  Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting.  Talent sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of clay.  Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton, and if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean.  Talent may make friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the divine power of winning love and veneration.  Enthusiasm cannot cling to what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple.  Great wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away by their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of its sword.  To the eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive the ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it.  No man of mere talent ever flung his inkstand at the devil.