the document used by the latter as a means of deriving from that assumed office an opportunity of vindictive defamation was drawn up after the poet’s death by Griswold himself.  To the controversy thus excited we are indebted for the illumination of one or two poems relinquished by the critics as hopelessly, if not intentionally, obscure. Ulalume, for example, held by some to be a mere experiment on the jingling capacity of words and the taste of readers for grappling with insoluble puzzles, is pronounced by one familiar with his most intimate feelings at the time of its composition a sublimated but distinct reflex of them and of the circumstances which gave them color.

Could Poe’s pen have cleared itself from the morbid influences which fixed it in a peculiar path, we might have missed some of his finest and most subtle poems and some prose efforts which we could better spare.  But his wonderful powers of analysis would have been serviceable upon a broader and more practical field.  He had an insight into the laws of language and of rhythm equalled by no one else in our day.  What is most mysterious in the forms and relations of matter had a special charm for him.  None could trace it more acutely; and his powers, matured by more and healthier years and applied in their favorite direction, were quite equal to results like those attained by his predecessor Goethe, the savant of poets.  He died a few years older than Burns and Byron, but more of a boy than either.  The man Poe we never saw.  The best of him was to come, and it never came.  Poe had, however, what he is not always credited with—­the sincerity and earnestness of maturity.  He was anything but a mere propounder of riddles.  Had he lived to our day, his office would have been to aid science, so wonderfully advanced in the intervening third of a century, in solving some of its own.  And in addition to that possible work we should have been none the poorer in the treasures of poetry he actually gave us.

Olivia Raleigh.  By W.W.  Follett Synge.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co.

In the few choice words of introduction to the American reprint Mrs. Annis Lee Wister admirably characterizes this charming novel.  It is indeed like a “clear, pure breath of English air:”  from the first page to the last it is redolent of the health of an “incense-breathing morn.”  There are no dark scenes here, leaving on the reader a feeling of degradation that such things can be—­no impossible villain weaving a web of intricate or purposeless villainy—­but all is fresh and genuine, and we close the volume with a sense of gratitude that such a story is possible.