while Emerson insists on the identity, the essential unity of all spiritual essences. Poe extends physical laws to their infinite powers in the spirit realm, but Emerson drops out all physical laws as mere phenomena, mere symbols of the ultimate truths of spirit. Take Poe's "The Power of Words," representing the conversation of Oinos and Agathos, for example. Agathos is explaining to Oinos the method by which disembodied spirits gradually acquire universal knowledge or wisdom in their immortal state. Oinos, the feminine spirit, is learning from Agathos, the masculine spirit, who has preceded Oinos by three centuries into the empyrean realms, the laws of the spiritual universe as the two spirits "swoop outward from the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets, and heart's-ease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns." Agathos explains that Nature under certain conditions will "give rise to that which has all the appearance of creation." (The italics are Poe's.) The first word of the Creator spoke into existence the first law. Since that time. secondary creation has been going on continuously, thus extending creation infinitely. The movement of the hand, for example, will inevitably set infinite vibrations into being, and this simple impulse, transmitted through earth's atmosphere, will continue for ever throughout the universe, eventually creating new worlds. On this basis the physical power of words, spoken words of course, will set infinite vibrations into being, and from these vibrations will come marvellous physical creations. For example, the passionate words of Agathos to Oinos while they were yet on earth had created a "fair star-which is the greenest and yet most terrible of all we have encountered in our flight. This wild

star-it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes, at the feet of my beloved-I spoke it— with a few passionate sentences-into birth. Its brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and

unhallowed of hearts." If this is not a concrete artistic application of transcendental ideas, though, as was Poe's wont, based on the extension of a natural law, I know not what else to call it.

Though Professor Smith insists on Poe's worldly wisdom and practical sanity regarding the political and social problems of his time, and though Dr. Crothers almost entirely neglects Emerson's business acumen and common touch with the practical affairs of life, it seems to me that the most striking difference between Poe and Emerson is to be found in their respective attitudes towards the common, workaday experiences of life. Poe is the dreamy, ineffectual, impractical cavalier; Emerson is the sane, complacent, practicalminded Puritan. Poe, with his chivalric and poetic temperament, is constantly making confusion of his business relations; Emerson with his practical New England turn of mind, is always restraining his idealism to fit the workaday experiences of life. Poe is always impecunious and in desperate financial straits; Emerson is constantly converting his talents into hard cash and even turning a hand to help his more impractical friends, as in his relations with Thoreau and Carlyle. Poe is always giving way to his craving for drink and drugs; Emerson is uniformly adverse to all physical stimulants, depending entirely on the natural sources of physical energy in good food and sound sleep.

The comparison might be extended indefinitely, but enough has been presented to suggest the richness of the contrast. Poe and Emerson are undoubtedly the most original creative minds produced by America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their best work was done in the same decades, those between 1830 and 1850. Hawthorne, whose greatest success came after 1850, and Whitman, whose work lies wholly after that date, are the only other American writers who may be classed with Poe and Emerson in creative power. Emerson is undoubtedly the greatest American thinker, and according to Paul Elmer More, he is,

"judged by an international or even by a broad national standard, the outstanding figure in American literature." Poe is our first eminent critic, the first exponent of the short story as a unique artistic form, and the supreme technician, atmospheric artist, and melodist in American poetry. If we admit that Emerson is, from the point of view of thought and philosophic wisdom, "the outstanding figure in American literature," we must also admit that Poe from the point of view of technique and artistic expression is the outstanding all-round literary man of America..

THE PUMP ROOM

In the Pump-room, so admirably adapted for secret dis. course and unlimited confidence.

NORTHANGER ABBEY.

CHARMED DAYS

Some days are charmed. They are not eventful days, usually. The world does not do anything different for your delight: it simply is different. The air your mind breathes has a bouquet; wine runs in your veins. It is not strange that one should remember one's first circus, or one's initiation into the mysteries of love, or death; but why should you remember the day you walked down a certain street, and— and-well, what did you do? Why, nothing! You walked, and breathed, and looked about, and, maybe, noticed the red fires of the sunset burning in some high window. But you remember that vagrant day for a quarter of a century, while a thousand more dutiful, or more fateful, or more amusing, are forgotten.

These days, I suppose, are a matter of spiritual weather. There are causes for them, just as there are causes for Indian Summer and April. But we do not think of the causes, multitudinous and august, that determine whether we shall wear the heavy coat or the light one, go a-picnicking or stay at home. We do not think of the area of low pressure Determined by winds that blow from the remotest past, in Montana that determines whether we shall have a norther in Texas, nor of the wheeling suns in their courses that bring us December or May. We say it is "the weather," and proceed to use or to enjoy it. So with a So with a man's spirit. woven of inherited currents and cross-currents of the most baffling intricacy, swayed by he knows not what ancient tide

drawing moons, so comes to him the climate of his mind. We call it his "disposition," and let it go at that. Yet even this prevailing internal climate, be it tropic or temperate or arctic, is not a stable thing, but is acted upon in its turn by an environment as complex and multifarious as itself, and by the man's own experience and will. Thence arises the weather of his mind. And under the perpetual "fair and warmer" of decent social intercourse, what raging storms, what incommunicable halcyon calms, what ghastly slumpings of the barometer!

I think my charmed days must be the Octobers and Aprils of this internal weather. Probably, in their origin, a delicate balance of a hundred tediously definite causes, the result is, nevertheless, something esoteric and magical; practically, it is the sort of lovely, wayward wonder we call a miracle. Beauty, says Professor Santayana, is the perception of an occasional exquisite harmony between the human organism and its environment: a pang of luxurious ecstacy, I take it, when we poor, spinning pegs, "so piteously contrived for pain," slip for an all-too-brief instant into some snug, round hole in the cosmos. We spend so many knocking and rattling around in the square ones! So my charmed days must be days of unusual adjustment. But you cannot bring them by taking thought; the process is far too complicated for that. You go your blundering way, up and down, doing as usual your piebald best, and lo! some day as you walk down a muddy street, the air is enchanted, the souls of things show through their luminous bodies, and the world is another world!

Nevertheless, for all the mystery of their origin, I think my charmed days are oftenest provoked, if they are not caused, by something in the external weather. They are not always bright, or what we commonly call glorious days; some of them have been grey and windless, or muffled in fog or snow. But a mystic fire burned at the heart of them. They were not prosaic days. Realism and romanticism are