of them are only purse-proud and assuming, but they form a class, and are named as above in the common speech.

It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when subdivided and distributed. A million is the unit of wealth, now and here in America. It splits into four handsome properties; each of these into four good inheritances; these, again, into scanty competences for 10 four ancient maidens, with whom it is best the family should die out, unless it can begin again as its great-grandfather did. Now a million is a kind of golden cheese, which represents in a compendious 15 form the summer's growth of a fat meadow of craft or commerce; and as this kind of meadow rarely bears more than one crop, it is pretty certain that sons and grandsons will not get another golden 20 cheese out of it, whether they milk the same cows or turn in new ones. In other words, the millionocracy, considered in a large way, is not at all an affair of persons and families, but a perpetual fact 25 of money with a variable human element, which a philosopher might leave out of consideration without falling into serious error. Of course, this trivial and fugitive fact of personal wealth does not cre- 30 ate a permanent class, unless some special means are taken to arrest the process of disintegration in the third generation. This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that one need not live a very long 35 life to see most of the rich families he knew in childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into the hands of the country-boys who were sweeping stores and carrying parcels when the now 40 decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating their venison over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in white- 45 topped boots with silken tassels.

There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste, 50 - not in any odious sense, but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is sheer stupidity, 55 and not to be willing to describe would show a distrust of the good-nature and intelligence of our readers, who like to

have us see all we can and tell all we see.

If you will look carefully at any class of students in one of our colleges, you will have no fficulty in selecting specimens of 5 two different aspects of youthful manhood. Of course I shall choose extreme cases to illustrate the contrast between them. In the first, the figure is perhaps robust, but often otherwise,- inelegant, partly from careless attitudes, partly from ill-dressing, the face is uncouth in feature, or at least common,- the mouth coarse and unformed,- the eye unsympathetic, even if bright, the movements of the face are clumsy, like those of the limbs, the voice unmusical,- and the enunciation as if the words were coarse castings, instead of fine carvings. The youth of the other aspect is commonly slender.- his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid, his features are regular and of a certain delicacy, his eye is bright and quick, his lips play over the thought. he utters as a pianist's fingers dance over their music.- and his whole air, though it may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher, you know what to expect from each of these young men. With equal willingness, the first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as a pointer or a setter to his field-work.

The first youth is the common countryboy, whose race has been bred to bodily labor. Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind of life it has lived. The hands and feet by constant use have got more than their share of development,

the organs of thought and expression less than their share. The finer instincts are latent and must be developed. A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of elaboration. You must not expect too much of any such. Many of them have force of will and character, and become distinguished in practical life: but very few of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is, almost always, the son of scholars or scholarly persons.

That is exactly what the other young man is. He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy to which I have referred, and which I am sure you will at once acknowledge. There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and

hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At last some newer name takes their place, it may be, -but you inquire a little and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the Chaunceys or the Ellerys or some of the old historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female descendant.

I suppose there is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general distinction. But the 15 reader who has never been a teacher will very probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come direct from the homespun-clad class of the people, and he may, perhaps, even 20 find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the English alphabet, but of no other.

intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain of 5 blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism; 10 thank God for it, but do not let it make you illogical. The race of the hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal of animal vigor. The scholar who comes by Nature's special grace from an unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality. A man's breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add muscular) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as his thinking organs. You broke down in your great speech, did you? Yes, your grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too hard on his famous Election Sermon. All this does not touch the main fact: our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best fruits come from well-known grafts, though now and then a seedling apple, like the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel, springs from a nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the gardens in the land.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude of those who 25 are continually working their way up into the intellectual classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as well 30 as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which drips through your appara- 35 tus of sands and sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into

Atlantic Monthly, January, 1860.

Poe was the only prominent American poet of the mid-century whose genius was nurtured outside of the New England environment. All his life he was at odds with Boston ideals and the Boston writers. He quarreled with Lowell, he accused Longfellow of plagiarism, and he sneered at Margaret Fuller, and yet, by a strange fatality, he was himself Boston born,- his parents, who were actors, were professionally employed there at the time, and eighteen years later he published there his first volume, Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. Poe was no Bostonian: he was essentially Southern, both by parentage and training. His father was a native of Baltimore, his mother an English actress who had come to the South. Both died the same year, 1811, and their boy was adopted into the family of a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Virginia, Mr. Allan, and reared as his own son. The years from six to eleven he spent in England whither his foster-father had gone for business reasons. Returning, he was prepared in a Richmond school and by private tutors for the University of Virginia where he was matriculated at the age of seventeen. After a year spent unprofitably in gambling and dissipation, he was withdrawn by Mr. Allan, and given a place in his counting house, but business could not hold the restless young poet. Suddenly he disappeared and it was not until two years later that his foster parents discovered him in the United States army. It is only of recent years that the mystery of this lost period in the poet's life has been cleared up. His early biographers, aided it must be confessed by Poe's own tales, filled the two years with Byronic adventure, but it is now proved that he spent the first year with his regiment at Boston,publishing there his first volume,- and that he was later transferred to Charleston, S. C., and then to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, where the family discovered him. Mr. Allan at once took steps to have him transferred to West Point where he might enter the profession like a gentleman, but as usual a fatality seemed to attend all his efforts for the boy. No sooner had Poe entered upon his West Point career than he became dissatisfied, asked Mr. Allan to allow him to resign, and, being refused, took steps that resulted in his dismissal from the institution.

Thrown now upon his own resources, Mr. Allan having at last disinherited him, Poe at length turned to literature. Like Hawthorne he began with short stories contributed to newspapers and magazines. In 1833 he won a prize of one hundred dollars offered by a Baltimore paper, and, what is more, attracted the attention of John P. Kennedy who put him in the way of becoming a regular contributor to The Southern Literary Messenger.

The remainder of his life falls into three periods: 1. The Southern Literary Messenger period, 1835-1837, during which time he arose from a minor assistant's position to that of editor-in-chief; 2. The Philadelphia period, 1838-1844, during which time he was successively editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, and Graham's Magazine, and was the most prominent contributor to the Saturday Museum, writing during the period much of his best work,- best in all its fields, poetry, fiction, criticism, and 3. The New York period which began with 1844 and ended with his death in 1849. During these last years he was connected with two magazines: Willis's Evening Mirror, for which he acted as literary critic, and the Broadway Journal, of which in 1845 he became sole editor and proprietor. The magazine dying in 1846, he was for the rest of his life a kind of literary vagabond without abiding literary domicile or stable plans. The twenty years of his literary life produced many editions of his prose and poetry, the most significant being Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 1829, Poems, 1831, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1839, The Raven, and Other Poems, 1845, Tales, 1845, Eureka: A Prose Poem, 1848.

Poe was essentially a magazine editor: he thought in terms of 'copy'; he had his readers constantly in mind: he must interest and hold them. He was an artist who understood the rules of his art; his bent was analytic,- there was something architectonic in all that he did. It made him a critic: whenever his sympathies or his prejudices were not involved his criticisms were sound and penetrating. Poetry was with him a passion.' In this he was of Coleridge rather than of Wordsworth, a haunter of the realms beyond the bounds of sense, a poet of beauty, of art for the sake of art.