four German books had their cuts almost examined out of
them, and the encyclopedia book, from "Safety-lamps to Stranglers,"
practically had its contents torn out and devoured. In after life
Aladdin could always speak with extraordinary fluency, feeling, and
understanding on anything that began with S, such as Simeon Stylites and
Senegambia. But the poems of Poe were what made his sickness worth while
and put the call upon all his after life. We learn of the critics and
professors of English that there are greater lyric poets than Poe. They
will base this on technicalities and theories of what poetry has been
and what poetry ought to be, and will not take into account the fact
that of all of them--Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth when he is a poet
at all, Heine, and the lyric body of Goethe and the rest--not one in
proportion to the mass of his production so often leaves the ground and
spreads wings as Poe,--

If I might dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than his might swell
From my lyre within the sky,--

and that where they have, they have perhaps risen a little higher, but
never have sung more hauntingly and clear. The wonderful sounds and
the unearthly purity--the purity of a little child that has died--took
Aladdin by the throat and shook up the imagination and music that had
lain dormant within him; his father's bent for invention clarified into
a passion for creation. The first thing he read was three stanzas on the
left-hand page where the book opened to his uneager hands, and his eyes,
expectant of disappointment,--for up to that time, never having read
any, he hated poetry,--fell on one of the five or six perfect poems in
the world:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore
That gently o'er a perfumed sea
The weary, wayworn 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.

And he knew that he had read the most exquisite, the most insouciant,
and the most universal account of every man's heart's desire--Mar