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Those were discouraging times in American literature, but Poe never
lost faith. He was finally to triumph wherever pre-eminent talents win
admirers. His genius has had no better description than in this stanza
from William Winter's poem, read at the dedication exercises of the
Actors' Monument to Poe, May 4, 1885, in New York:
He was the voice of beauty and of woe,
Passion and mystery and the dread unknown;
Pure as the mountains of perpetual snow,
Cold as the icy winds that round them moan,
Dark as the eaves wherein earth's thunders groan,
Wild as the tempests of the upper sky,
Sweet as the faint, far-off celestial tone of angel
whispers, fluttering from on high,
And tender as love's tear when youth and beauty die.
In the two and a half score years that have elapsed since Poe's death
he has come fully into his own. For a while Griswold's malignant
misrepresentations colored the public estimate of Poe as man and as
writer. But, thanks to J. H. Ingram, W. F. Gill, Eugene Didier, Sarah
Helen Whitman and others these scandals have been dispelled and Poe is
seen as he actually was-not as a man without failings, it is true, but
as the finest and most original genius in American letters. As the
years go on his fame increases. His works have been translated into
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