The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1104]
With placid silver; edging leaf and trunk
Where gloom clung deep around; but chiefly sought
With melancholy splendor to illume
The dark-mouthed caverns where Orion lay,
Dreaming among his kinsmen.
The ocean realm below, and all its caves
And bristling vegetation, plant and flower,
And forests in their dense petrific shade
Where the tides moan for sleep that never comes.
A fawn, who on a quiet green knoll sat
Somewhat apart, sang a melodious ode,
Made rich by harmonies of hidden strings.
Autarces seized a satyr, with intent,
Despite his writhing freaks and furious face,
To dash him on a gong, but that amidst
The struggling mass Encolyon thrust a pine,
Heavy and black as Charon’s ferrying pole,
O’er which they, like a bursting billow, fell.
—— then round the blaze,
Their shadows brandishing afar and athwart,
Over the level space and up the hills,
Six giants held portentous dance.
—— his safe return
To corporal sense, by shaking off these nets
Of moonbeams from his soul.
—— old memories
Slumbrously hung above the purple line
Of distance, to the East, while odorously
Glistened the tear-drops of a new-fall’n shower.
Sing on!
Sing on, great tempest! in the darkness sing!
Thy madness is a music that brings calm
Into my central soul; and from its waves,
That now with joy begin to heave and gush,
The burning image of all life’s desire,
Like an absorbing, fire-breathed, phantom god,
Rises and floats! here touching on the foam,
There hovering over it; ascending swift
Starward, then swooping down the hemisphere
Upon the lengthening javelins of the blast!
Now a sound we heard,
Like to some well-known voice in prayer; and next
An iron clang that seemed to break great bonds
Beneath the earth, shook us to conscious life.
It is Oblivion! In his hand — though naught
Knows he of this — a dusky purple flower
Droops over its tall stem. Again! ah see!
He wanders into mist and now is lost! —
Within his brain what lovely realms of death
Are pictured, and what knowledge through the doors
Of his forgetfulness of all the earth
A path may gain?
But we are positively forced to conclude. It was our design to give “Orion” a careful and methodical analysis — thus to bring clearly forth its multitudinous beauties to the eye of the American public. Our limits have constrained us to treat it in an imperfect and cursory manner. We have had to content ourselves chiefly with assertion, where our original purpose was to demonstrate. We have left unsaid a hundred things which a well-grounded enthusiasm would have prompted us to say. One thing, however, we must and will say, in conclusion. “Orion” will be admitted, by every man of genius, to be one of the noblest, if not the very noblest poetical work of the age. Its defects are trivial and conventional — its beauties intrinsic and supreme.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.
MACAULAY has obtained a reputation which, although deservedly great, is yet in a remarkable measure undeserved. The few who regard him merely as a terse, forcible and logical writer, full of thought, and abounding in original views often sagacious and never otherwise than admirably expressed — appear to us precisely in the right. The many who look upon him as not only all this, but as a comprehensive and profound thinker, little prone to error, err essentially themselves. The source of the general mistake lies in a very singular consideration — yet in one upon which we do not remember ever to have heard a word of comment. We allude to a tendency in the public mind towards logic for logic’s sake — a liability to confound the vehicle with the conveyed an aptitude to be so dazzled by the luminousness with which an idea is set forth, as to mistake it for the luminousness of the idea itself. The error is one exactly analogous with that which leads the immature poet to think himself sublime wherever he is obscure, because obscurity is a source of the sublime — thus confounding obscurity of expression with the expression of obscurity. In the case of Macaulay — and