system of apprenticeship wrong, because it resembled slavery.* In this matter the bureau undoubtedly rendered a good service, for it checked a disposition on the part of many to hold col. ored children in a state of subjection. All persons to whom colored children were bound were required to give a bond for the fulfilment of the contract, which required education of the apprentice to the extent of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The theory of the bureau in regard to apprentice cases was based upon sound principles, but in its practical application it was at times severe upon both races. Arbitrary methods marked this sphere of bureau activity as they did all others. Opposition developed in the State and Governor Worth even appealed to General Howard against General Robinson's action in certain cases but without effect.‡ The system continued until the State was reconstructed.

Closely connected with the relief work of the bureau, though not a part of it, was the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company, a banking institution, chartered by Congress and intended to encourage habits of thrift among the negroes. Three branches were established in North Carolina, at New Bern, Raleigh, and Wilmington, respectively. The conduct of the company was characterized by carelessness, extravagance, and fraud, and it soon failed. In time the depositors received a part of their money, but a large part was gone forever. The following table shows the total deposits in the North Carolina branches and

The experience of the negroes with this institution bred a deep distrust of banks, which has not to this day been entirely removed. A more serious injury was the discouragement of habits of saving which resulted from this first experience.

*Sen. Docs., No. 27, 1st Sess. 39th Cong., p. 16. †Sen. Docs., No. 6, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 112. Executive Letters, Worth, I. p. 306.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

Poe and Hoffmann

BY PALMER COBB

Associate Professor of German in the University of North Carolina

The unique position which Poe occupies in the history of American letters challenges perennially the interest of the literary investigator. He is at once the most fascinating and the most enigmatical figure exhibited in the annals of our literature. The imprint of his genius as well as the distinctive quality of his imagination was of such pronounced character as to relegate his work to a position of absolute isolation among the productions of his contemporaries. His life and his literary achievement stand out in bold relief against the background of the life about him. And the two are strangely lacking in points of contact. Poe voiced none of the strivings of the new civilization growing up around him. His work reflects no phase of life which we may call distinctively American, either from a provincial or from a national standpoint. His genius assumes, more than is usual, the character of the phenomenal. Other literary men of the time frame their productions in more or less familiar settings. They gather up certain threads of the life about them and weave them into the fabric of their work. Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Lowell hold up to our view people and conditions which are familiar to us. Poe's verse, and in particular his short story, stand entirely aloof with respect to contemporary contributions of the same genres. He transports us to a fantastic dream world created by his own fancy, and by the skill of his portraiture, forces us to move with him easily in this strange realm, the while we marvel at its wonders.

It is a fact not without significance that Poe has been studied and cultivated with much more zeal by his foreign admirers than by his own countrymen. In France, for example, Poe found in Charles Baudelaire an ardent supporter and apostle. Not content with his own discovery of the American poet, Baudelaire, translating and interpreting unwearily, heralded abroad the fame of this new genius. Poe early enjoyed in France a fame which in enthusiastic devotion far surpassed the recognition

which he had gained in America. In Germany the process was similar. He had no German apostle, but a Poe cult was early developed and has steadily gathered strength with the passing decades. A critical German edition of his works has recently been published, which attests alike the painstaking spirit of German scholarship and that widespread acquaintance with Poe among the Germans which called the edition into being. Translations of his works exist also in Spanish, Italian, Russian, and the Scandinavian languages.

As was noted above, it was no whimsical trick of fate which in Europe bore his fame aloft on the crest of a wave of good fortune. His art as developed in his short story is essentially nonAmerican. It is a commonplace of Poe criticism to say that the dominant note of his life rang out of tune with the accords of that new and struggling civilization in which he found his destiny cast. It is more exceptional, for Poe's countrymen at least, to establish a relation of cause and effect between this essentially non-American character of his art and the schooling which he gathered from foreign models. We look at the record of his life and see him battling throughout years with the prosaic facts of his daily existence. We observe him struggling to find his level and to express himself to his countrymen, and we see him finally engulfed in a veritable tidal wave of misunderstanding and misconception. His very memory was for years darkened by the calumnious onslaughts of his first biographer, Griswold, while his genius is just now coming into its own among Americans in the belated recognition of the value of his work. The superficial student of Poe observes that he was what Edmund Clarence Stedman called a "misfitted American." The corollary to this fact is that it was the soil and atmosphere of Europe that was best adapted to the florescence of his genius and that it was from this source that he drew freely for a part at least of his own spiritual and intellectual nourishment. In the German edition of Poe's works just referred to, the editor in his prefatory account of Poe's life and works remarks: "His life was that of a dreamer from the old motherland Europe, and if one considers his half Norman extraction, one can safely say, a Germanic dreamer. It was a dream life lead in the brutally real and almost exclusively mercantile milieu of North America. This crossing of the life and

the man which resulted, and which is so unique, is Poe, the romanticist, transplanted to reality's heaviest soil."

Disregarding for the moment the Germanic or non-Germanic character of Poe's romanticism and the community of interest exhibited in the material and subject matter of his work and that of the Germans, there can be but one view as to his interest in German letters. His critical and narrative writings are replete with quotations and discussions of German literature. His critique of Longfellow's Ballads, for example, furnishes opportunity for a discussion of the echoes of Longfellow's German studies to be found in the latter's work. A reference in his "Marginalia" to de la Motte Fouqué's "Theodolf the Icelander" brings out an expression of opinion as to the state of German criticism. "Individual Germans have been critical in the best sense, but the masses are unleavened. Literary Germany thus presents the spectacle of the impulsive spirit surrounded by the critical, and of course in some measure influenced thereby." Poe admits "the German vigour, the German boldness, directness, imagination and some other qualities in the first or impulsive epochs of British and French letters." But he is "not ashamed to say that he prefers Voltaire to Goethe and holds Macaulay to possess more of the truly critical spirit than Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel combined." In the "Fall of the House of Usher" Poe cites Tieck's "Journey into the Blue Distance" as one of the books which "for years had formed no small part of the mental existence of the invalid." In his essay on Hawthorne, he says with reference to the latter's originality: "Those who speak of him as original, mean nothing more than that he differs in his manner or tone, and in his choice of subjects, from any author of their acquaintance their acquaintance not extending to the German Tieck, whose manner, in some of his works, is absolutely identical with that habitual to Hawthorne." In this connection a striking passage occurs in Poe's "Morella:" "Morella's erudition was profound. . . . I soon found, however, that perhaps on account of her Presburg education, she placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of German literature. These, for what reason I cannot imagine, were her favorite and constant study-and that in process of time they became my own should be attributed to the simple but

effectual influence of habit and example." Introductory to his story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," Poe quotes in the original and then translates one of Novalis's fragments. Numerous other quotations in the original German are scattered throughout his works. One is thus forced to the alternative of rating Poe as a literary charlatan or granting him a measure of acquaintance with the German language and literature, specifically with the productions of the German romanticists.

Poe's critics have from the first connected his name with that particular phase of romanticism which was developed in Germany. His first tale, "Berenice," was published in the Southern Literary Messenger, March, 1835, and the editor found it expedient to introduce it to his readers with the following note: "Whilst we confess we think there is too much German Horror in his subject, there can be but one opinion as to his force and style." From that time until the present day, the association of Poe's work with that of the German romanticists has been made the subject of more or less vague discussion by his biographers and critics. In the last critical edition of Poe's works, the editor, Professor Harrison, declares that Poe was "saturated with the doctrines of Schelling," and speaks of "Novalis and Schelling, his masters across the German sea." Mention is also made of the translations of Tieck, de la Motte Fouqué, Chamisso, the Schlegels, Schiller, Heine, Uhland -"opening up a wonder-world of picturesque Germanism." German students of Poe are unanimous in their assumption of the kinship of Poe's tales to the works of his German brother romanticists. And usually they proceed a step further and connect his name with that of that bizarre figure of German romanticism, the narrator, Ernst Theador Amadeus Hoffmann. A German student of Poe voices the characteristic German view as follows:* "Poe's literary relationships with our Amadeus Hoffman are by far his most important ones. Both as to content and technique, the narrator Poe, the author of the 'Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque,' owes undoubtedly much to the richly imaginative and fantastic German poet." Edmund Clarence Stedman finds that "there is a pseudo-horror to be found in certain of his (Poe's) pieces, and enough of Hoffmann's methods to suggest that the bril

*Edgar Poe in der franzosischen Literatur. L. P. Betz, Frankfurt a. M., 1893.