and fear with their forebodings. His work will endure forever, because it is the child of beauty and of grief." Still more acute and illuminating is the remark of José de Castro y Serrano, the Spanish novelist. "Not long ago," he writes in 1871, "a great New-World genius (the Anglo-American Poe) astonished the present generation with his extraordinary tales (Historias extraordinarias). These were based on a philosophical principle, the sublimation, that is, of the marvelous, a principle which the human heart never has abandoned and never will abandon; and the skilful narrator was able to stir and to terrify the literary world despite the fact that Hoffmann had written many years before. The reason is that Hoffmann started from the fantastic in order to arrive naturally at the marvelous, while Poe starts in search of the marvelous from the threshold of the real and actual."
The Spanish centennial article is contributed by Ángel Guerra[1], who has been rated as "one of the four greatest living Spanish critics." He finds the same stubborn hostility to Poe in America that has existed from the beginning. In his native land "Poe has had to conquer a renown inch by inch which our old Europe would have sowed on all the winds of fame." He remains solitary, unrelated, un-American, not reached by influences from the writers of his own land or from those of England. "When they buried the remains of that unfortunate man, the Yankees thought they had buried in oblivion the talent of their greatest, their most original, their most profound poet,
- ↑ See "El centenario de Edgard Allan Poe" (La Espana Moderna, April, 1909).
