follow the bent of his own fancies; and rare fancies they were, for it was of them that some of his best works were born in this upper chamber. Here he wrote "Hyperion," in 1838 and 1839. Its publication, which was undertaken by John Owen, the University publisher in Cambridge, marked an era in American literature. Every body read the book, and every body talked of it. It was a poem in prose, and none the less the work of a poet because professedly "a romance of travel." The young read it with enthusiasm, and it sent hundreds to follow Paul Flemming's footsteps in the distant Fatherland, where the "romance of travel" became their guidebook. The merchant and the lawyer, the journalist and the mechanic, reading its pages, found that the stern realities of life had not withered up all the romance of their natures, and under its fascinations they became boys again. Even Horace Greeley, that most practical and unimaginative of men, became rapturous over it. It was a great success, and established the poet's fame beyond all question, and since then its popularity has never waned.
In 1840, he published the "Voices of the Night," which he had heard sounding to him in his haunted chamber. This was his first volume, and its popularity was even greater than that of "Hyperion," although some of the poems had appeared before, in