The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume 6

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ...last, and by far the most truly important consideration of all, however, is the music of' Appalachia' itself; nothing could be more sonorous, more liquid, or of fuller volume, while its length is just sufficient for dignity. How the gutteral 'Alleghania' could ever have been preferred for a moment is difficult to conceive. I yet hope to find ' Appalachia' assumed. St Austin de libris Manichaeis t Mr Field, in a meeting of ' The New York Historical Society' proposed that we take the name of 'America,' and bestow 'Columbia ' upon the Continent. cxxx. The 'British Spy' of Wirt seems an imitation of the 'Turkish Spy,' upon which Montesquieu's 'Persian Letters' are also based. Marana's work was in Italian--Doctor Johnson errs. CXXXI. M, as a matter of course, would rather be abused by the critics than not be noticed by them at all, but he is hardly to be blamed for growling a little now and then over their criticisms, just as a dog might do if pelted with bones. CXXXII. About the 'Antigone,' as about all the ancient plays, there seems to me a certain baldness, the result of inexperience in art, but which pendantry would force us to believe the result of a studied and supremely artistic simplicity. Simplicity, indeed, is a very important feature in all true art--but not the simplicity which we see in the Greek drama. That of the Greek sculpture is everything that can be desired, because here the art itself is simplicity in itself and in its elements. The Greek sculptor chiselled his forms from what he saw before him every day, in a beauty nearer to perfection than any work of any Cleomenes in the world. But in the drama, the direct, straight-forward, un-German Greek had no Nature so immediately presented from which to make copy. He did what he...