On the other hand, a writer in "The Church Review" of New
Haven, whom we shall presently see more of, was incited to a tilt
against him as a rabid New England theorist, the outcome, of
phalansteries, a subverter of marriage and of all other holy things. In
like manner, while Hawthorne was casting now and then a keen dart at the
Transcendentalists, and falling asleep over "The Dial" (as his journals
betray), Edgar Poe, a literary _Erinaceus_, wellnigh exhausted his
supply of quills upon the author, as belonging to a school toward which
he felt peculiar acerbity. "Let him mend his pen," cried Poe, in his
most high-pitched strain of personal abuse, "get a bottle of visible
ink, hang (if possible) the editor of 'The Dial,' cut Mr. Alcott, and
throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of the 'North
American Review.'" This paper of Poe's is a laughable and pathetic case
of his professedly punctilious analysis covering the most bitter
attacks, with traces of what looks like envy, and others of a resistless
impulse to sympathize with a literary brother as against the average
mind. He begins with a discussion of originality and peculiarity: "In
one sense, to be peculiar is to be original," he says, but the true
originality is "not the uniform but the continuous peculiarity, ...
giving its own hue to everything it touches," and touching everything.
From this flimsy and very uncertain principle, which seems to make two
different things out of the same thing, he goes on to conclude that,
"the fact is, if Mr.
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