One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. that of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it shall continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to

finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan— to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

[Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865. Reprinted, by permission of The Century Company, from Complete Works of Lincoln, vol. ii, pp. 656–657.]

room.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

[Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Jan. 19, 1809, and died in Baltimore. Oct. 7, 1849. He was the grandson of David Poe, a distinguished Maryland officer in the Revolution. His father and mother were both actors. Poe was early left an orphan, and was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy Scotch tobacco merchant in Richmond. He was educated in private schools in Richmond and in England, and entered the University of Virginia in 1826, but was withdrawn in the same year by his adopted father, who placed him in his countingOn account of differences with his family, he left them in 1827, entered the army under an assumed name, and served for two years in a battery of artillery. He was then partially reconciled with Mr. Allan, and received an annuity until Mr. Allan's death in 1834. In 1830 he entered the Military Academy at West Point, but was dismissed in the following year by courtmartial on charges of remissness in duty and disobedience. From that time until his death he led the uncertain and irregular life of a struggling writer, editor, and literary hack, in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. His brilliant intellect was in most cases appreciated by his numerous employers and colleagues. But his irritable and morbidly sensitive nature, his occasional indulgence in drink, which produced in him the effect of temporary insanity, and in opium, interfered greatly with his success. His health was for years much impaired, and he was during short periods, particularly after his wife's death, scarcely responsible for his acts. In person, Poe was strong and handsome. Women were especially attracted by him, and probably understood the inequalities of his genius better than did his male contemporaries. His wife, who was less than fourteen at her marriage in 1836, he cared for tenderly until her death in 1847. Poe's character has had its bitter detractors, its apologists, and its warm admirers. Some have thought him an unfortunate and persecuted man; some, a dishonorable creature of genius; and there have not been wanting those who attribute his almost inexplicable vagaries and lapses from rational living to disease of the brain. The facts of his life have been patiently collected by G. E. Woodberry in his Life (Boston, 1885), and in the "Memoir " introducing the edition, by E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry, of his complete works.

Poe's stories and criticisms were generally first published in periodicals. The collections published during his lifetime were Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Tales (1845), and The Literati (1850). Eureka: A Prose Poem was published in 1848. Poe's complete works have been collected and edited, with especial attention to the text, by E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry. From the text of this edition, with the permission of the publishers, Herbert S. Stone and Co, the extracts in this volume are reprinted.]

ONE of Poe's Tales of the Grotesque portrays the fantastic doings of the so-called Angel of the Odd. The name is not inapt for Poe himself. In all his writings, with the possible exception of his criticism, there is present the note of abnormality; and even in his criticism, the wilfulness and the egotism often reach a pitch that suggests morbidness of nature. Poe was a decadent before the days of decadence, and it is through no mistaken instinct that French decadents from Baudelaire to Mallarmé have delighted to do him honor.

Poe was fond of mystifications, and his confessions, as regards methods of work, are not to be taken too literally. Nevertheless, the rules he lays down in his essay on Hawthorne, for the writer of fiction, more particularly of the tale, are unquestionably frank in expression and true to Poe's own instincts and habits. These rules make very clear the artificiality of art as Poe conceived of it, its remoteness in substance from normal experience; they also illustrate the perfection of Poe's mastery of technique within the limits which his conception of art imposed upon him. According to Poe's theory, the tale ought to be an exquisite tissue of moods and images wrought skilfully together through the medium of prose for the production of a single effect. The first task of the literary artist is to determine what the single effect is to be, at which his tale is to aim among the almost countless effects of terror, passion, horror, grotesqueness, or humor, that are open to his choice. Having determined on his effect, the artist is to keep it vividly before his imagination, and to let it control him in all his selection of details; he is to construct his entire story so that every fact, every incident, every character, even every phrase, figure, and cadence, shall prepare for or intensify this single effect, and bring out its peculiar quality. The effect is an end in itself, and is its own justification. The story need have no symbolic implications, - need send no suggestions of remote moral truths darting over the nerves to the brain. According to Poe's own practice, the effects best worth aiming at are emotional shivers of some sort, such as come from a sudden keen sense of the strangeness, or grotesqueness, or mystery, or horror of life. Each of Poe's best tales turns out on analysis to be simply an exquisitely adjusted series of devices for playing adroitly upon responsive nerves, and

putting a sensitive temperament into a harmoniously vibrating mood.

The material that Poe's nature offers him most generously for fabrication into art is as artificial as the methods by which he likes to work. Poe had a degenerate's excitable nerves, ardent senses, and irresponsible feelings. Moreover, he had an altogether modern delight in watching intently for their own sakes the tricks of his nerves and senses, and the shadow-play of his moods. He was an amateur of sensations and inpressions, prone to dwelling upon them half mystically, and bent on capturing the essential charm of each. He was extraordinarily sensitive to all the fleeting" unconsidered trifles" of the life of the senses and the feelings. In one of his stories he boasts of the delight of beholding "floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view"; of pondering "over the perfume of some novel flower" of "growing bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence." This same morbidness and semi-hysterical sensitiveness may be traced also in Poe's heroes; they, too, are tortured by the intensity of their sensations; they are persecuted by fixed ideas; they isolate themselves from the world, brood over their abnormal experiences of feeling and imagination, and live in dream-regions of their own fantastic invention. Poe's favorite characters, Usher, the lovers of Ligeia, of Eleanora, and of Morella, are degenerates, pure and simple, victims of nervous disease, experimenters with narcotics, and dabblers in death. Through all these characteristics, they call to mind the heroes of modern decadent French fiction, Huysmans' des Esseintes, for example. Like modern decadent heroes, too, Poe's heroes feel the fascination of the morally perverse, and spice the æsthetic banquet with deadly sins, sins whose piquancy lies in their abnormality of thought and feeling, not in any gross criminality of act. Moreover, Poe himself despises the conventional and the commonplace both in character and in life; he is cynical and disenchanted, and boasts of his cynicism and disenchantment. "I really perceive that vanity," he asserts in one of his letters, "about which most men merely prate, the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future, I have no faith in human perfectibility, I think