A Strange Discovery | Page 9

had compelled him to laugh aloud. Works of science,
particularly scientific works in the domain of physics, he delighted in.
His imagination was of a most charming character. It was at that time
in my life almost a passion with me to analyze human nature--to
theorize over the motives and the results of human action; over the
probable causes of known or assumed effects, and the reverse--in short,
I thought myself a philosopher. I have never met another person whom
it so much interested me to study as it did this young American. But
after ample opportunity to know him, even now as I sit writing more
than twenty years later, and I think of the pleasure of that temporary
friendship in far-away Illinois, I am puzzled about many things
concerning Doctor Bainbridge. He certainly possessed a scientific mind.
He himself said that he had no very great love for written poetry: had
he a poetic mind? He loved the beautiful in life: he loved symmetry in
form, he loved harmony in color, he loved good music. And yet, though
he had read the English-writing poets, he seemed to care less for their
work than for anything else in literature. The thought of this
inconsistency has perplexed me whenever I have thought of it through
all these years. As I have intimated, he was charmed by the beautiful,
and by every known expression of beauty; but for the strictly metrical
in language-expression, he evinced almost a distaste. I have often
thought that he had, through some peculiar circumstance in his earlier
life, acquired a suggestive dislike to the very form of verse. To this
peculiarity there was, however, exception, to which I am about to
allude.

By the time we had smoked out a cigar apiece, we were exchanging
views and comments on such writers, English and American, as came
to mind. One of the books that lay on my table was a copy of Byron;
though most of the others were the works of American
authors--Hawthorne, Irving, Longfellow, Poe, and one or two others.
He had picked up my Byron, and glancing at it had remarked that if all
the poets were like Byron he would devote more time than he did to the
reading of verse. I recall a remark that, with Byron's personality in
mind, he made as he returned the book to the table. "Poor fellow!" he
said. "But what are we to expect of a man who had a volcano for a
mother, and an iceberg for a wife? A woman's character is largely
formed by the quality of men that enter into her life; a man's, even
more so by the quality of women that enter into his. I wonder if Byron
ever intimately knew a true woman?--a woman at once intellectually
and morally normal, in a good wholesome way--a woman with a good
brain and a warm heart? No man, in my opinion, is a really good man
save through the influence of good women."
It is impossible for me to recall much of what he said of the American
authors of whom we talked, with the exception of Poe; and there are
reasons why I should clearly remember in substance, and almost in
words, everything that was said of him. Of all writers, with one
exception, Poe interests me the most; and I judge that in interest, both
as a personality and as a literary artist, Doctor Bainbridge placed Edgar
Allan Poe first and uppermost among those who have left to the world
a legacy of English verse or prose. And this feeling was, I truly believe,
in no measure influenced by Poe's nationality. If Bainbridge possessed
any narrow national prejudices I never learned of them.
He spoke rapturously of Poe as a poet--"The Raven," as a matter of
course, receiving high praise: Of that unique and really grand poem, he
said that he thought it the best in the English language.
It was at this point in our conversation that he told me he rarely read
verse; that he had, with certain exceptions, never done so with much
pleasure, but that in some way he had managed to read nearly all the
noted poetry published in our language. Still, he said, there were poems

which absorbed and almost fascinated him. Of the English poets of the
present century, Byron alone had written enough poetry to prove
himself a poet; and he explained that in his opinion the writing of an
occasional or chance poem, though the poem were true poetry, did not
make of the author a poet. Then he mentioned a poem which for more
than a century has been by the critical world accepted as of the highest
order of true poetry. Gradually warming to the subject, he said:
"A poem