ABSTRACT
Poe and Hawthorne are two brilliant exceptions in American literature. Among Americans, they are the only two literary men who have had the sense of beauty and the artist's conscience in a supreme degree. Hawthorne was like a magician, hidden from the world, creating his beautiful phantasms; Poe was like a banished spirit, abased among men, exercising an intellect, and drawing upon a memory that implied a clearer and higher state of being than that of material and common life. Poe was dominated by intellectual conscience; Hawthorne was dominated by moral conscience. The problem of sin engaged Hawthorne; the processes of crime—that is, pure intellect in action—engaged Poe. In Hawthorne, moral conscience was abnormal in its development. Both Poe and Hawthorne were alike and splendidly endowed with imagination; but Poe had more invention—in fact, a most marvellous faculty of invention—and he was the more purely intellectual of the two.
