Coleridge’s youthful efforts give no promise whatever of
      that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest,
      tenderest, most original and most purely imaginative poems of
      modern times. Byron’s “Hours of Idleness” would never find a
      reader except from an intrepid and indefatigable curiosity. In
      Wordsworth’s first preludings there is but a dim foreboding of
      the creator of an era. From Southey’s early poems, a safer augury
      might have been drawn. They show the patient investigator, the
      close student of history, and the unwearied explorer of the
      beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
      who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer
      and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The
      earliest specimens of Shelley’s poetic mind already, also, give
      tokens of that ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to
      soar above the regions of words, but leaves its body, the verse,
      to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his
      early insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the
      metrical arrangement of certain conventional combinations of
      words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate physical
      organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only
      remarkable when it displays an effort of _reason,_ and the rudest
      verses in which we can trace some conception of the ends of
      poetry, are worth all the miracles of smooth juvenile
      versification. A school-boy, one would say, might acquire the
      regular see-saw of Pope merely by an association with the motion
      of the play-ground tilt. Mr. Poe’s early productions show that he could see through the
      verse to the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling
      that all the life and grace of the one must depend on and be
      modulated by the will of the other. We call them the most
      remarkable boyish poems that we have ever read. We know of none
      that can compare with them for maturity of purpose, and a nice
      understanding of the effects of language and metre. Such pieces
      are only valuable when they display what we can only express by
      the contradictory phrase of _innate experience._ We copy one of
      the shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and
      symmetry of the outline are such as few poets ever attain. There
      is a smack of ambrosia about it. 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 sansculottism 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, 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 his
      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. When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that
      he has produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he
      possesses it at all is to say that he needs only zeal, industry,
      and a reverence for the trust reposed in him, to achieve the
      proudest triumphs and the greenest laurels. If we may believe the
      Longinuses and Aristotles of our newspapers, we have quite too
      many geniuses of the loftiest order to render a place among them
      at all desirable, whether for its hardness of attainment or its
      seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is, according to
      these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of the
      country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable
      residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of
      solitude be, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of
      their idiosyncrasy. Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of
      vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of
      imagination.