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By Root 16997 0

school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is done purposely, and in accordance with mysterious harmonic laws entirely beyond the comprehension of ordinary ears, makes the matter worse. There is no heresiarch so dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating life, and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, that the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage for cacophony. He holds something of the same place in relation to Swinburne and Poe, that Donne did to Spenser three hundred years ago. In this condition of things it may seem useless to found any claim for Poe on the ground of the exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We may hope, however, some day to regain the use of our ears, and to discover once more that music and metre are utterly distinct arts. When that re-discovery has been made, Poe will resume his position as one of the most uniformly melodious of all those who have used the English language.

Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection of his prosody have occasionally objected that in the most popular examples of it, "The Raven" and "The Bells," he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be objected, with equal force, that Victor Hugo in "Les Djinns" and even Tennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" made use of "tricks." On the other hand, if the charge be deserved, it seems odd that in the course of nearly seventy years no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat the wonderful experiment. In each poem there are what must be judged definite errors against taste in detail—Poe's taste was never very sure—but the skill of the long voluptuous lamentation, broken at equal intervals by the croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation, as if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of the bells, is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in keeping with the personal genius of the writer, that it is surely affectation to deny its value.

It is not, however, in "The Bells" or in "The Raven," marvellous as are these tours de force, that we see the essential greatness of Poe revealed. The best of his poems are those in which he deals less boisterously with the sentiment of mystery. During the latest months of his unhappy life, he composed three lyrics which, from a technical point of view, must be regarded not only as the most interesting, which he wrote, but as those which have had the most permanent effect upon subsequent literature, not in England merely, but in France. These are "Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," "For Annie." One of Poe's greatest inventions was the liquidation of stanzaic form, by which he was able to mould it to the movements of emotion without losing its essential structure. Many poets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to do it with the stanza. In the three latest lyrics this stanzaic legerdemain is practised with an enchanting lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous and elastic grace. Perhaps, had it been subjected to the poet's latest revision, "For Annie" would have been the most wonderful of all in the sensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluctuations of sentiment.

We may, then, briefly summarise that Poe's first claim to commemoration is that he was the pioneer in restoring to the art of poetry a faculty which it had almost lost in its attempt to compete with science and philosophy. It had become the aim of the poets to state facts; it was given to Poe to perceive that no less splendid a future lay before those who only hinted feelings. He was the earliest modern poet who substituted the symbol for the exact description of an object or an event. That "expression directe," about which the French have been debating for the last quarter of a century, and over which M. Adolphe Retté and M. Albert Mockel periodically dispute like Fathers of the Church, was perceived and was deliberately repudiated by Poe eighty years ago. He was deeply impregnated with the sense that the harmony of imagination is not destroyed, but developed, by