ley describes the peculiarities of his own mental organisation, and the antagonism of opposing elements therein, seems not inappropriately to express the two agencies that made the life of Poe appear so inconsistent with his poetry. He was, says Shelley, speaking of himself "A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift- What malign influence first drew this fatal cestus of infirmity around the moral energy of Poe, it is now difficult to say. That he felt it himself keenly is plain from the few bitter words which he has appended to the collected edition of his poems by way of preface. The allusion to his own opinion of the imperfections of these poems, we have no doubt, perhaps unconsciously included the short-comings and more important defects of his life, though as usual he throws the blame upon circumstances, which in candour he should have stated were in a great degree the result of his own misconduct. Alluding to the necessities of life which prevented him from applying himself to poetry with that entire devotion which would have resulted in something more commensurate with his ideas of the grandeur and dignity of the Muse, than those lyrics, which though inexpressibly sweet to us, were probably, to an intellectually proud spirit like his, but the lispings of a poetical childhood: he says: "Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making at any time any se rious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not-they cannot at will be excited with any eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations of mankind." That true poetry is "a passion," an impulse, an inspiration- a something that "cannot at will be excited" is unquestionably true; but we doubt very much that to a passionate nature like that of Poe, the elysium of leisure to which, like all poets, he looked forward as the period when his great work was to be produced, would have eventuated in the splendid results which his imagination had conceived. His own poems are almost decisive on this point. The only really valuable ones are those which seem to have been struck off like brilliant sparks from the glowing anvil of life. The inferior ones, which we read once from curiosity, but to which we seldom return again, are those written at a very early period of life, when it may be supposed he had some portion of that fatal leisure, enough to allow his passion to grow cold, and his happy improvisations to be lost in diffuse, and occasionally imitative harmonies. Repose, amid the stagnant competencies of life, like slumbering on the Pontine marshes by midnight, is death to some spirits. The collision of circumstances, and even the lowering of impending evils, not unfrequently strike from some hearts rays that illuminate the whole heaven of poetry, as the rushing together of two thunder-clouds lights up the darkness, and awakens the echoes of the night. A few lines will be sufficient to mention the principal events of Poe's short and unhappy life, without entering into those painfully-minute details to which we have adverted. He was born at Baltimore, in Virginia, in the year 1811. His present editor remarks that the name is not a common one in England, and considers the poet to have been connected, though remotely, with a "highly respectable family of the same name in Ireland." His father, David Poe, it is stated, having "married an enchanting actress of uncertain prospects," adopted the precarious profession of his wife. They both, however, died young, leaving three children of whom, we believe, Edgar was the eldest totally unprovided for. A rich and benevolent gentleman, named Allan, who had no children of his own, adopted the destitute Edgar, and brought him to England, where he placed him at school for five years. At the expiration of this period, in the year 1822, he returned to America, and was first sent to the academy at Richmond, and subsequently to the university at Charlotteville. His "eccentricities" (to use the mildest phrase) here commenced, and soon reached such a climax as to exhaust even the patience of his patron, who really acted, all through the wayward course of his adopted son, with more than the affection and forgiveness of a father. The evil taint in the mind or heart of Po here became painfully distinct. He satirised his benevolent and indulgent benefactor, wrote him a sharp and un a poet composed to the accompaniment of words. The music of it haunts us ever after we have once heard it. There is something elfin and dreamlike about it, and it sounds in our memory like the strain heard by the poet of Khubla Khan in his vision: A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw : It was an Abyssinian maid, This is its usual effect upon most readers. On those who have themselves a portion of the gift and faculty divine" its influence is still more striking. They cannot rest until they set some of their own thoughts to the same fairy-like music, and tell the tale to some willing or unwilling auditor. In that case the reader or listener, like the wedding-guest in the "Ancient Mariner" of the poet we have just quoted, has no option "He cannot choose but hear." We have already given a stanza from this poem: the entire is too long and too well known for quotation; but we shall give a few lines, taken unconnectedly, as specimens of the harmony to which we have alluded. What elaborate melody is there not in the first lines of the following stanza !— "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain The exquisite artifice of the first line in his noble German ballad, "Charle- "Tis the glorious Car'lus Magnus, with his gleamy sword in hand, With another extract from this singular poem of Poe we shall pass on to others that are, perhaps, not so generally well known. It will be perceived that he again alludes to his lost wife -German Anthology, v. i. p. 191. "Even she, his loved and lost Ameen, "Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer, 'Wretch,' I cried, 'thy God hath lent thee, by these angels he hath sent thee Quoth the Raven, Never more.'" this mournfullest yet sweetest of ele- "When through life unblest we rove, This lyric we give without abridge. 66 ANNABEL LEE. That a maiden there lived whom you may By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. "Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown for ever, * Viz., the angels-a graceful fancy.-ED. Again, we have the same sad and bitter recollection, and melancholy foreboding that we meet everywhere in the poetry, perhaps more explicitly expressed in the following lyric than elsewhere: "TO ONE IN PARADISE. "Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pineA green isle in the sea, love A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers; "Ah, dream too bright to last! Ah, starry hope! that didst arise But to be overcast! A voice from out the future cries, 'On! on!'-but o'er the past (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies, Mute, motionless, aghast! แ For, alas! alas! with me 'And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, Our readers must have remarked in the passages already quoted a peculiar habit of the poet-it can scarcely be called an artifice, it seems so appropriate and unforced-namely, the frequent repetition of a favourite line in most of the poems, which, with slight variations and those principally the substitution of one harmonious adjective for another, appears and reappears sometimes with an eccentric, but always with a melodious effect. It is this peculiarity of Poe's verse which so strikingly reminds us of Mangan's, although we think that the resemblance between the two men went much farther and deeper, and that this similarity in the mode of expression, original in each, clearly indicates a mental or psychological affinity. Two or three additional examples from Poe will, perhaps, set this resemblance in a more striking light, when followed by a few stanzas from the scattered melodies of Mangan. We take the shortest specimens we can meet with: "EULALIE. "I dwelt alone In a world of moan, And my soul was a stagnant tide, Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride, "Ah less-less bright The stars of the night, Than the eyes of the radiant girl! And never a flake That the vapour can make, With the moon-tints of purple and pearl, Can vie with the modest Eulalie's most unregarded curl. Can compare with the bright-eyed Eulalie's most humble and careless curl. "Now doubt-now pain, Come never again, For her soul gives me sigh for sigh, And all day long, Shines bright and strong, Astarté within the sky While ever to her dear Eulalie, upturns her matron eye- We take these stanzas from the beautiful lines entitled "FOR ANNIE. "My tantalised spirit Here blandly reposes, Of myrtles and roses. "For now, while so quietly A holier odour About it of pansies- Commingled with pansies. "And so it lies happily Bathing in many, Of the tresses of Annie." Our last specimen of this class shall be the opening stanzas of a lament, so thoroughly Manganish in thought and expression, that we would have unhesitatingly assigned them to poor Clarence, had we met them without the writer's name attached to them, and had they been free from certain Cockney false rhymes, in the eighth stanza, which the correct and educated ear of Mangan would never have allowed him to perpetrate. It is rather annoying to find in a poet like Poe, such rhymes as "vista" and "sister" (p. 28), and "Leda" and "reader," as at p. 14. We suppose he acquired this not very elegant peculiarity of pronunciation, during the five years he spent in England, at Stoke Newington, wherever that famous locality may be : ULALUME. "The skies they were ashen and sober, The leaves they were crisped and sere, The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October, Of my most immemorial year. It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of WeirIt was down by the dark tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. "Here once through an alley Titanic, Of cypress I roamed with my soulOf cypress, with Psyche, my soul, These were days when my heart was volcanic As the scoriac rivers that rollAs the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek, In the ultimate climes of the pole That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek, In the realms of the boreal pole. "Our talk had been serious and sober, But our thoughts they were palsied and sere Our memories were treacherous and sere; For we knew not the month was October, And we marked not the night of the year (Ah, night of all nights in the year!) We noted not the dim lake of Auber, (Though once we had journeyed down here-) Remembered not the dark tarn of Auber, Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." VOL. XLII.-NO. CCXLVII. The entire poem is too long for quotation. It was probably written on the anniversary of the funeral of his "lost Lenore," to which it seems to refer. Our space permits us only to give one poem of Mangan, in proof of the singular resemblance which we consider exists between him and Poe. It is fortunately one, however, which, along with proving in a sufficiently satisfactory manner, a similarity in the mechanism of their verse, by the introduction of these wild, yet sweet repetitions to which we have referred, equals, if indeed it does not surpass, in passion, in melody, in music-the very best efforts of the muse of Poe. We omit the first and last stanzas, which, though very beautiful in themselves, give a political or allegorical meaning to what should simply be (what it really is) one of the most passionate and melodious love songs ever written: |