"Tell this soul, with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore-" "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.""

THE POETICAL WORKS

OF

EDGAR ALLAN POE.

THE RAVEN.

I.

ONCE upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten

lore;

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came

a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping - rapping at my chamber door.

""Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;

Only this, and nothing more."

tends to all his poems.

Traces of spiritual emotion are not to be found there. Sorrow there is, but not divine sorrow. There is not any approach to the Holy -to the holiness which mingles with all Tennyson's poetry as the Presence with the wine. And yet, when you view his poems simply as poems, this characteristic does not make itself felt as a want. It would seem as if he had only to deal with the Beautiful as a human aspirant. His soul thirsted for the "supernal loveliness." That thirst was to him religion-all the religion you discover in him. But if we cannot call him religious, we may say that he supplies the materials of worship. You want flowers and fruit for your altar; and wherever Poe's muse has passed, flowers and fruit are fairer and brighter.

With all this passion for the Beautiful, no poet was ever less voluptuous. He never profaned his genius, whatever else he profaned. "Irene," "Ulalume," "Lenore," "Annabel Lee," "Annie," are all gentle, and innocent, and fairy-like. A sound of music-rising as from an unseen Ariel, brings in a most pure and lovely figure—sad, usually; so delicate and dreamy are these conceptions, that indeed they hint only of some transcendent beauty-some region where passion has no place, where

"Music, and moonlight, and feeling,
Are one,"

as Shelley says.

Poe loved splendour,-he delighted in the gorgeous-in ancient birth-in tropical flowers-in southern birds-in castellated dwellings. The hero of his "Raven" sits on a "violet velvet lining;" the dead have "crested palls." He delighted, as Johnson says of Collins, "to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens." His scenery is everywhere magnificent. His genius is always waited upon with the splendour of an oriental monarch.

I have spoken of the tinge of melancholy which gives an effect like moonlight to all that he has done. I have said elsewhere that his "genius, like the eyes of a southern girl, is at once dark and luminous.”* "The Raven," "Ulalume," "For Annie," all turn on death. And this melancholy, too, is of a heathen. character. You might say that this book is funestus. The stamp of sorrow is upon it, as cypress hung over the doors of a house among the ancients when death had entered there. Remembering this, one must admit that his range is narrow. He has, for instance, no humour--he had little sympathy with the various forms of man's life. No one can claim for him a rich dramatic humanity, such as makes much of the charm and some of the greatness of our great poet Browning. But he is perfectly poetic in his own province. If his circle is a narrow, it is a Singleton Fontenoy, vol. ii.