Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[210] who smiled sweetly on Poe or Griswold or Willis might find herself placed among the Muses. Poe complimented and rather patronized Hawthorne, but found him only “peculiar and not original;” saying of him, “He has not half the material for the exclusiveness of literature that he has for its universality,” whatever that may mean; and finally, he tried to make it appear that Hawthorne had borrowed from himself. He returned again and again to the attack on Longfellow as a willful plagiarist, denouncing the trivial resemblance between his Midnight Mass for the dying year and Tennyson's Death of the old year, as “belonging to the most barbarous class of literary piracy.” To make this attack was, as he boasted, “to throttle the guilty;” and while dealing thus ferociously with Longfellow, thus condescendingly with Hawthorne, he was claiming a foremost rank among American authors for obscurities now forgotten, such as Mrs. Amelia B. Welby and Estelle Anne Lewis. No one ever did more than Poe to lower the tone of literary criticism in this country; and the greater his talent, the greater the mischief.