, "and the immortal stars awake again." None may thwart the
unerring justice of the gods, not even the Transcendentalists. What
matter that one man's life was miserable, that one man was broken on
the wheel? His work lives and his crown is eternal. That the work of
his age was undone, that is the pity, that the work of his youth was
done, that is the glory. The man is nothing. There are millions of
men. The work is everything. There is so little perfection. We
lament our dearth of poets when we let Poe starve. We are like the
Hebrews who stoned their prophets and then marvelled that the voice
of God was silent. We will wait a long time for another. There are
Griswold and N. P. Willis, our chosen ones, let us turn to them.
Their names are forgotten. God is just. They are,

"Gathered unto death without a dawn.
And the immortal stars awake again."

_The Courier_, October 12, 1895

You can afford to give a little more care and attention to this
imaginative boy of yours than to any of your other children. His
nerves are more finely strung and all his life he will need your
love more than the others. Be careful to get him the books he likes
and see that they are good ones. Get him a volume of Poe's short
stories. I know many people are prejudiced against Poe because of
the story that he drank himself to death. But that myth has been
exploded long ago. Poe drank less than even the average man of his
time. No, the most artistic of all American story tellers did not
die because he drank too much, but because he ate too little. And
yet we, his own countrymen who should be so proud of him, are not
content with having starved him and wronged him while he lived, we
must even go on slandering him after he has been dead almost fifty
years. But get his works for this imaginative boy of yours and he
will tell you how great a man the author of "The Gold Bug" and "The
Masque of the Red Death" was. Children are impartial critics and
sometimes very good ones. They do not reason about a book, they just
like it or dislike it intensely, and after all that is the
conclusion of the whole matter. I am very sure that "The Fall of the
House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Black Cat" will
give this woolgathering lad of yours more pleasure than a new
bicycle could.

_The Home Monthly_, May 1897

_Walt Whitman_

Speaking of monuments reminds one t