y never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.

* * * * *

My hopes are with the Dead, anon
My place with them will be,
And I with them shall travel on
Through all Futurity;
Yet leaving here a name, I trust,
That will not perish in the dust.

[Sidenote: Wordsworth, Poet Laureate]

[Sidenote: "The Lost Leader"]

After Southey's death, William Wordsworth was made Poet Laureate. His
acceptance of this benefice from the government incensed his more radical
friends. Robert Browning then wrote the famous invective lines entitled
"The Lost Leader":

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat--
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others, she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags--were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us--they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!

[Sidenote: Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico"]

[Sidenote: Edgar Allan Poe]

[Sidenote: "The Gold Bug"]

America this year lost three of her prominent literary men by the deaths of
Allston, the poet and painter, Noah Webster, the lexicographer, and Key,
the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner." The historian Prescott now
brought out his great "Conquest of Mexico." Longfellow published his
"Spanish Student." Edgar Allan Poe entered upon his new journalistic
venture "The Stylus." For this he wrote his stories of "The Tell-Tale
Heart," "Leonore," and his "Notes upon English Verse." For other
publications he wrote "The Pit and the Pendulum," and the striking poem,
"The Conqueror Worm." His fearful tale of the "Black Cat" was published in
the "Saturday Evening Post." At this time he was ailing in health, while
his young wife, Virginia, was dying. During these trying months his
principal income was a hundred dollar prize received for his famous story
of "The Gold Bug," published in the "Dollar Newspaper." The judges
confessed l