heart that is in freOther lyrics per

fancy, while the feeling is such as only the
quent communion with Nature can give us.
vaded by the same sweetness, occur in Mr. Lowell's volumes.
We can only venture upon one other quotation, however, and
we select it as a specimen of the poet's highest style alike of
thought and imagery. The poem is rather ambiguously titled
'Above and Below,' but the scope of it is sufficiently clear.
'O, dwellers in the valley land,

Who in deep twilight grope and cower,
Till the slow mountain's dial-hand
Shortens to noon's triumphal hour,-
While ye sit idle, do ye think
The Lord's great work is idle too?
That light dare not o'erleap the brink
Of morn, because 'tis dark with you?
Though yet your valleys sleep in night,
In God's ripe fields the day is cried,
And reapers, with their sickles bright,
Troop, singing, down the mountain side;
Come up, and feel what health there is
In the frank dawn's delighted eyes
As, bending with a pitying kiss,
The night shed tears of earth she dries!
The Lord wants reapers; O, mount up
Before night comes, and says 'Too late!'
Stay not for taking scrip or cup,
The Master hungers while ye wait;
'Tis from these heights alone your eyes
The advancing spears of Day can see,
Which o'er the eastern hill-tops rise,
To break your long captivity.
Lone watcher on the mountain height,
It is right precious to behold
The first long surf of glorious light
Flood all the thirsty east with gold!
But we who in the shadow sit,
Know also when the day is nigh,
Seeing thy shining forehead lit
With his inspiring prophecy.

Thou hast thine office; we have ours;
God lacks not early service here,
But what are thine eleventh hours?
He counts with us for morning cheer.
Our day for Him is long enough,
And when He giveth work to do
The bruised reed is amply tough
To pierce the shield of error through.

But not the less do thou aspire
Light's earlier messages to preach;
Keep back no syllable of fire,-
Plunge deep the rowels of thy speech.
Yet God deems not thine aëried sight
More worthy than our twilight dim,
For meek obedience, too, is light,

And following that is following Him.'-p. 312-13.

A fair reputation, we have already remarked, has frequently been founded on things which apparently required but very little effort on the part of him who won it. A single lyric, written under the influence of true poetic inspiration, has given not only temporary éclat, but enduring remembrance, to a name which attached to twelve books of an epic might have rested amid dust on the shelves of publishers, or found a comfortable and not altogether useless oblivion at the trunkmaker's or pastry-cook's. If the time when such ready and powerful blasts from the trump of fame could be found to echo a single strain of silvery music struck from the harp of genius has gone by with us, it has been otherwise in America. It is a fact of some importance, that in spite of all the 'fast' tendencies prevailing there, the poets have not only their proper circle of readers, but can still extend that circle; and it is also a notable circumstance that the reputation of one of their boldest and most original writers rests among his countrymen upon a single poem of some sixteen or seventeen stanzas, written within the last few years. To those who know anything more about Edgar Allan Poe than that he wrote a wild and wonderful poem called 'The Raven,' it will not be deemed an extraordinary thing that his works should be considered as among the most striking specimens of imaginative literature which America has yet produced; but very few do know anything more about him, and it may therefore be asserted, with perfect propriety, that upon that single production his fame has hitherto rested. That it will extend we have not the smallest doubt; but it will be when his other writings are more generally known and appreciated-not as the labours of a life, but as the efforts of a few misspent years-the convulsive self-assertions of genius struggling with everything earthly, sensual, and demoralizing. There is no more melancholy chapter in the history of literature than that which records the life of Edgar Poe; nothing which more fitly illustrates the perfect consistency, inexplicable as it may seem, of an exquisite sense of the beautiful in the moral as well as the physical with extreme practical debasement. Life, that awful and mysterious thing,

which none of us regard with sufficient seriousness, was to him little else than a mad bacchante dance; the close of it, more awful and solemn still, seemed but the uprooting of a weed. A nature wayward though strong, an imagination powerful and capable of lofty flights, an existence which might have been one of high purpose and great achievement were turned by personal depravity, by early neglect, by sad misfortunes, and probably, too, by the want of that sympathy which such men so deeply need, to banefulness and bitterness. The history is too painful to be dwelt upon even for the sake of the lessons which it is fitted to teach-lessons which poor human nature, however highly gifted, is ever and anon repeating. We would not wish to lift the veil which death has hung over the career of this unhappy poet. Suffice it to say, that the record of it, written with even a larger charity than his biographers have yet manifested, would testify but too strongly to the mournful fact that the lives of men of genius have often been the saddest contradictions, and, in the light of truth and purity, the darkest chapters in the history of individual human nature. Yet the spiritual part of this man, so far as the greater portion of his poetry shows it, only exhibits his fine sensibilities, and while, like all subjective poetry, it gives us glimpses of selfindulgence, it speaks in a tone of bitter censure, such as the most rigid moralist would not dare to emulate. The things we are left to imagine by the language of anguish and remorse, the self-crimination, so to speak, and the wailing over a worse than waste-life, are far more profitably suggestive than a narrative of them could be. We look in upon Poe, through the medium of his poetry, in his silent moments, and the utterances which come from the depths of his consciousness, give us far higher moral lessons than are ever learned from the contemplation of vice or frailty. We are saved a world of troublesome attempts to explain the mysteries of temperament, for the man, as seen by himself in his true light, and when in his right mind, may be said to stand before us. While we read the works of Poe, then, as those of a poet, or in order to examine his title to that distinctive appellation, we must keep in view the circumstances under which he wrote, or the feeling in which his writings originated. Remembering these, we shall find that his poetry is not of a very wide range, but that it is intensely expressive. His prose works exhibit, often to a disgusting degree, the workings of a morbid imagination, though a wonderfully powerful one; but he seems to have kept his poetry sacred to the utterance of his better feelings. Much of it is written, as if only for the relief which such utterance gave to an overcharged

heart, and it is therefore scarcely necessary to add, that it is wholly his own, for anything suggestive of imitation in such a case would be simply ludicrous. Its very rhythm speaks of the feeling prevailing at the time when one piece or another was composed, for a wild melody flits through it like a soul. Thus, The Raven,' which we need not quote, for it is well knownthe only one of his poems which is so-has a cadence peculiarly its own. Amid all the varieties of versification there is nothing which at all resembles it, so far as we recollect, either in structure or in adaptation to the sentiments expressed and the fancies embodied. Any stanza we may extract will suffice to illustrate this. Thus—

'But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul on that one word he did outpour. Nothing farther then he uttered, not a feather then he fluttered, Till I scarcely more than muttered, "Other friends have flown before;

On the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast, and followed faster, till his songs one burden bore,
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore,
Of "Never-nevermore.'

But the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming, throws his shadow on the

floor,

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted-nevermore.'-p. 15.

These verses give the spirit of the poem both in style and sentiment. But to make good Poe's claim to be considered a writer of unquestionable genius, it is necessary that we should show that his expression of emotion is such as not only shows what that is to him, but such as will come home to the hearts of others. There are strange fancies to be found in several of his lyrics, which, were they associated with a less terrible earnestness, might be considered mere conceits. He draped the forms of his sorrows often in fantastic garments, sometimes in the most ghastly ones of which a distraught mind could conceive; but there is a touching simplicity even in the

fanciful here. This poem was written after the death of his young and devoted wife :

'It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee ;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought,
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;

But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee,

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that long ago,

In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came,
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

But the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee,

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

Of my beautiful Annabel Lee.

And so all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling, my darling, my life, and my bride,

In the sepulchre by the sea,

In her tomb by the sounding sea.'—p. 37.

And in a strain as full of music, the poet sings the same sorrow To One in Paradise :'

Thou wast all that to me, love,

For which my soul did pine,

A green isle in the sea, love,

A fountain and a shrine,

All wreathed with fairest fruits and flowers,

And all the flowers were mine.

But alas! alas! with me

The light of life is o'er;

No more-no more-no more

Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,

Or the stricken eagle soar.