Longfellow could do some things in rhyme and rhythm, but his genial talent did not accomplish such singing as this, and as little could he compass the serene height of strain which Poe maintains with such certainty.

Every charge of poetic plagiarism against Poe does but establish more clearly his utter originality of method.1 Mrs. Browning and Longfellow, whom he is charged with imitating, are themselves facile imitators, who, somehow, do not contrive to improve on their originals; but Poe, in the one or two cases in which he really copied in his adult period, lent a new value to what he took. Where he seems to have adopted ideas from others the transmutation is still more striking. A writer already referred to, who is as far astray in laying as in denying charges of plagiarism against Poe, declares that his Dreamland "palpably paraphrases Lucian's Island of Sleep" - meaning, I suppose, the description of the Island of Dreams in the True History; and the statement is so far true that in Lucian there is a Temple of Night in the Island, and that the categories of the dreams include visions of old friends; but to call the poem a paraphrase is absurd. There is all the difference of seventeen hundred years of art between the Greek's semi-serious fantasy and the profound and magical note of Poe's poem: —

"By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidòlon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,

I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule

From a wild, weird clime that lieth sublime,
Out of SPACE - out of TIME."

Genius, Mr. Arnold has well said, is mainly an affair of energy; and the definition would hold for all the work of Poe, whose creations, in the last analysis, are found to draw their power from the extraordinary intensity which belonged to his every mental opera

1 There is a certain air of Nemesis in these charges against Poe, who was apt to be fanatical in imputing plagiarism to others. But it is remarkable that no one has ever pointed out that Poe's own excellent definition of poetry, "the rhythmical creation of beauty" (Essay on The Poetic Principle), is a condensation of a sentence by (of all men) Griswold. See Poe's notice of Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America (Ingram's ed. of Works, IV, 315). It may be noted that Poe's treatment of Griswold in this notice is remarkably friendly; and whatever of offence he may have given his future biographer in his lecture on the same subject, the latter must have been a malignant soul indeed to seek for it, in the face of such amends, the vile revenge he subsequently took.

tion an intensity perfectly free of violence. Be his fancy ever so shadowy in its inception, he informs it with the impalpable force of intellect till it becomes a vision more enduring than brass. There is no poet who can so "give to aery nothing a local habitation and a name." It was perhaps not so wonderful after all that commonplace people should shun, as hardly belonging to human clay, the personality which brooded out such visions as these: 1

With unwaning vividness the unearthly vision burns itself tremorless upon the void, till it is almost with a shudder of relief that the spellbound reader cons the close:

"And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence."

1 In such poems, and in some of the Tales, it may very well be that opium has had some part, as it so clearly had in the happiest inspirations of Coleridge.

Perhaps such terrific imaginings can never be taken into common favour with healthy dwellers in the sunlit world; but it is hard to understand how any, having studied them, can find them forgetable. It cannot for a moment be pretended of these verses, even by the sciolists of criticism, that they lack "inspiration" and spontaneity of movement; detraction must seek other ground. We find, consequently, that the stress of the hostile attack is turned mainly on one poem, in which the poet's customary intension of idea appears to lose itself more or less in a dilettantist ringing of changes on sound. I have no desire to seem in the least degree to stake Poe's reputation on Ulalume, which trenches too far on pure mysticism for entire artistic success, and at the same time is marked by an undue subordination of meaning to music; but I cannot help thinking that the dead set made at that piece is unjustifiable. Mr. R. H. Stoddard is exceptionally acrid on the subject.

So.

"I can perceive," he writes, in a memoir of Poe, "no touch of grief in Ulalume, no intellectual sincerity, but a diseased determination to create the strange, the remote, and the terrible, and to exhaust ingenuity in order to do No healthy mind was ever impressed by Ulalume, and no musical sense was ever gratified with its measure, which is little beyond a jingle; and with its repetitions, which add to its length without increasing its general effect, and which show more conclusively than anything else in the language the absurdity of the refrain when it is allowed to run riot, as it does here.” 1 Now, this censure is fatally overdone. Mr. Stoddard had on the very page before admitted that Ulalume was, "all things considered, the most singular poem that [Poe] ever produced, if not, indeed, the most singular poem that anybody ever produced, in commemoration of a dead woman." A critic should know his own mind before he begins to write out a judgment. Here we have an explicit admission of the extreme remarkableness of a given poem; then a denial that it ever "impressed a healthy mind"; then an unmeasured allegation that "no musical sense was ever gratified" with its musical elements. Let one stanza answer the praise of the star Astarte:

"And I said: 'She is warmer than Dian;

She rolls through an ether of sighs
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
Those cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies

To the Lethean peace of the skies

1 Memoir in Widdleton's ed. of Poe, p. 130.

Come up, in despite of the Lion,

To shine on us with her bright eyes
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes.""

SO

Mr. Stoddard must be told that there are some of us who do not wish any of these repetitions away, and who think the culminating music is closely analogous to effects produced a hundred times by Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven, who had all some little gift of melody, and were considerably given to the "repetend,” as Mr. Stedman happily re-christens the so-called refrain. The abovequoted stanza is the best, no doubt, and there is one flaw in it, namely, the "dry on," which is truly an exhaustion of ingenuity; but even here one is struck by the imperial way in which Poe buttresses his lapse with the whole serene muster of his stanza curiously different a procedure from the fashion in which Mr. Swinburne, for instance, or even Mr. Browning, scoops a rhymeborne figure into his verse and, consciously hurrying on, leaves it, in its glaring irrelevance, to put the whole out of countenance. Poe's few deflections from purity of style are dominated by his habitual severity of form. As for the charge of insincerity, it is enough to say that it has been brought against every poet who has artistically expressed a grief; it being impossible for some people to realize that art feeds on deep feelings, not at the moment of their first freshness, but when revived in memory. A more reasonable objection is brought against Ulalume on the score of its obscurity; but that too is exaggerated; and the announcement of one critic that it is a "vagary of mere words," of an "elaborate emptiness," is an avowal of defective intelligence. The meaning of the poem is this: the poet has fallen into a revery in the darkness; and his brain the critic says it was then a tottering brain - is carrying on a kind of dual consciousness, compounded of a perception of the blessed peace of the night and a vague, heavy sense of his abiding grief, which has for the moment drifted into the background. In this condition he does what probably most of us have done in connection with a minor trouble dreamily asks himself, "What was the shadow that was brooding on my mind, just a little while ago?" and then muses, "If I have forgotten it, why should I wilfully revive my pain, instead of inhaling peace while I may?" This, I maintain, is a not uncommon experience in fatigued states of the brain; the specialty in Poe's case being that the temporarily suspended ache is the woe of a bereavement a kind of woe which,

after a certain time, however sincere, ceases to be constant, and begins to be intermittent. The Psyche is the obscure whisper of the tired heart, the suspended memory, that will not be wholly appeased with the beauty of the night and the stars; and the poet has but cast into a mystical dialogue the interplay of the waking and the half-sleeping sense, which goes on till some cypress, some symbol of the grave, flashes its deadly message on the shrinking soul, and grief leaps into full supremacy. Supposing Poe's brain to have been undergoing a worsening disease in his later days, this its last melody has even a more deeply pathetic interest than belongs to the theme.

Take finally, as still further test of Poe's poetic gift, the poems El Dorado, Annabel Lee, and For Annie. The first is a brief allegory, with something of a moral, but a moral too pessimistic to have any ethically utilitarian quality; the second a lovely ballad enshrining the memory of his married life; the third a strange song, impersonally addressed to one of the women to whom he transiently turned in his lonesome latter years a wonderful lullaby in which a dead man is made placidly to exult in his release from life and pain, and in the single remaining thought of the presence of his beloved. In these poems we have the final proof of the inborn singing faculty of Poe. Some of his pieces, as has been already admitted, are works of constructive skill rather than outpourings of lyric fulness; and such a musical stanza as this:"And all my days are trances,

And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams -
In what ethereal dances!

By what eternal streams!"

has perhaps a certain stamp of compilation. But no unprejudiced reader, I think, will fail to discern in the three poems last named a quite unsurpassable limpidity of expression. They evolve as if of their own accord. In El Dorado the one central rhyme is reiterated with a perfect simplicity; Annabel Lee is almost careless in its childlike directness of phrase; and For Annie is almost bald in its beginning. But I know little in the way of easeful word music that will compare with this: