Edgar Allan Poe, "Marginalia," The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), vol. XVI, pp. 40-41

"It was a pile of the oyster, which yielded the precious pearls of the South, and the artist had judiciously painted some with their lips parted, and showing within the large precious fruit in the attainment of which Spanish cupidity had already proved itself capable of every peril, as well as every crime. At once true and poetical, no comment could have been more severe, &c." - Mr. Simms' "Damsel of Darien." Body of Bacchus! - only think of poetical beauty in the countenance of a gaping oyster!

"And how natural, in an age so fanciful, to believe that the stars and starry groups beheld in the new world for the first time by the native of the old were especially assigned for its government and protection." Now, if by the Old World he meant the East, and by the New World the West, I am at a loss to know what are the stars seen in the one which cannot be equally seen in the other.

Mr. Simms has abundant faults - or had; - among which inaccurate English, a proneness to revolting images, and pet phrases, are the most noticeable. Nevertheless, leaving out of the question Brockden Brown and Hawthorne, (who are each a genus [sic],) he is immeasurably the best writer of fiction in America. He has more vigor, more imagination, more movement and more general capacity than all our novelists (save Cooper), combined.