the respective excellence of Mr. Bryant's Thanatopsis and of Mr. Lowell's Commemoration Ode, I can not say that either of them leaves in my ear the echo of a single note of song. It is excellent good speech, but if given us as song, its first and last duty is to sing. The one is most august meditation, the other a noble expression of deep and grave patriotic feeling on a supreme national occasion; but the thing more necessary, though it may be less noble than these, is the pulse, the fire, the passion of music—the quality of a singer, not of a solititary philosopher or a patriotic orator. Now, when Whitman is not speaking bad prose he sings, and when he sings at all he sings well. Mr. Longfellow has a pretty little pipe of his own, but surely it is very thin and reedy. Again, whatever may be Mr. Emerson's merits, to talk of his Poetry seems to me like talking of the scholarship of a child who has not learned its letters."
But the praise that would have meant most to the living Poe came from Tennyson. Poe's admiration for Tennyson knew no bounds, though he did not live to read the poems on which the laureate's fame is now seen to rest most securely. "I am not sure," he once wrote, "that Tennyson is not the greatest of poets.... By the enjoyment or non-enjoyment of the Morte d'Arthur or of the Œnone I would test any man's ideal sense." He loved to recite from The Princess the song beginning,
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
and used to say that the words,
When unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square,
