they respected his
life. They judged him by a censorious standard which took no account of
genius. And Poe shared with dignity and without regret the common fate
of prophets. If he is still an exile in American esteem, he long since
won the freedom of the larger world. He has been an inspiration to
France, the inspirer of the nations. He did as much as any one of his
contemporaries to mould the literary art of our day, and in the prose of
Baudelaire and Mallarme he lives a life whose lustre the indifference of
his compatriots will never dim.

Whence comes it, this sedulous attention to style, which does honour
to American literature? It comes in part, I think, from the fact that,
before the triumph of journalism, American men of letters were secluded
from their fellows. They played no _role_ in the national drama. They
did not work for fame in the field of politics. They were a band of
aristocrats dwelling in a democracy, an _imperium in imperio_. They
wrote their works for themselves and their friends. They made no appeal
to the people, and knowing that they would be read by those capable
of pronouncing sentence, they justified their temerity by a proper
castigation, of their style. And there is another reason why American
literature should be honourably formal and punctilious, If the written
language diverges widely from the vernacular, it must perforce be
studied more sedulously than where no such divergence is observed. For
the American, accustomed to the language spoken by his countrymen and
to the lingo of the daily press, literary English is an acquired tongue,
which he studies with diligence and writes with care. He treats it
with the same respect with which some Scots--Drummond, Urquhart, and
Stevenson--have treated it, and under his hand it assumes a classic
austerity, sometimes missed by the Englishman, who writes it with the
fluency and freedom bred of familiar use. The stately and erudite work
of Francis Parkman is a fair example. The historian of 'Montcalm and
Wolfe' has a clear title to immortality. Assuredly he holds a worthy
place among the masters. He is of the breed of Gibbon and Michelet, of
Livy and Froude. He knows how to subordinate knowledge to romance. He
disdains the art of narrative as little as he disdains the management
of the English sentence. He is never careless, seldom redundant. The
plainest of his effects are severely studied. Here, for instance, is his
portrait of an Indian chief, ep