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dents as you meet with every day in the newspapers, feel truth to be stranger far than fiction. Look, as a specimen of the first, to his "Descent into the Maelstrom," and to his "Hans Pfaal's Journey to the Moon." Both are impos

sible the former as much so as the latter-but he tells them with such Dante-like directness, and such Defoe-like minuteness, holding his watch, and marking, as it were, every second in the progress of each stupendous lie, that you rub your eyes at the close, and ask the question, Might not all this actually have occurred? And then turn to the "Murders in the Rue St. Morgue," or to the "Mystery of Marie Roget," and see how, by the disposition of the drapery he throws over little or ordinary incidents, connected, indeed, with an extraordinary catastrophy, he lends

"The light which never was on sea or shore"

to streets of revelry and vulgar sin, and to streams whose sluggish waters are never disturbed save by the plash of murdered victims, or by the plunge of suicides desperately hurling their bodies to the fishes, and their souls to the flames.

In one point, Poe bears a striking resemblance to his own illustrious countryman, Brockden Brown-neither resort to agency absolutely supernatural, in order to produce their terrific effects. They despise to start a ghost from the gravethey look upon this as a cheap and fade expedient-they appeal to the "mightier might" of the human passions, or to those strange unsolved phenomena in the human mind, which the terms mesmerism and somnambulism serve rather to disguise than to discover, and sweat out from their native soil superstitions far more powerful than those of the past. Once only does Poe approach the brink of the purely preternatural -it is in that dreary tale, the "Fall of the House of Usher;" and yet nothing so discovers the mastery of the writer as the manner in which he avoids, while nearing, the gulf. There is really nothing, after all, in the strange incidents of that story but what natural principles can explain. But Poe so arranges and adjusts the singular circumstances to each other, and weaves around them such an artful mist, that they produce a most unearthly effect. Perhaps some may think that he has fairly crossed the line in that dialogue between Charmian and

Iras, describing the conflagration of the world. But, even there, how admirably does he produce a certain feeling of probability by the management of the natural causes which he brings in to produce the catastrophe. He burns his old witchmother, the earth, scientifically! We must add that the above is the only respect in which Poe resembles Brown. Brown was a virtuous and amiable man, and his works, although darkened by unsettled religious views, breathe a fine spirit of humanity. Poe wonders at, and hates man; Brown wonders at, but at the same time pities, loves, and hopes in him. Brown mingled among men like a bewildered angel; Poe like a prying fiend.

We have already alluded to the singular power of analysis. possessed by this strange being. This is chiefly conspicuous in those tales of his which turn upon circumstantial evidence. No lawyer or judge has ever equalled Poe in the power he manifests of sifting evidence of balancing probabilities-of finding the multum of a large legal case in the parvum of some minute and well-nigh invisible point-and in constructing the real story out of a hundred dubious and conflicting incidents. What scales he carries with him! how fine and tremulous with essential justice! And with what a microscopic eye he watches every footprint! Letters thrown loose on the mantel-piece, bell-ropes, branches of trees, handkerchiefs, &c., become to him instinct with meaning, and point with silent finger to crime and to punishment. And to think of this subtle algebraic power, combined with such a strong ideality, and with such an utterly corrupted moral nature! Surely none of the hybrids which geology has dug out of the graves of chaos and exhibited to our shuddering view is half so strange a compound as was Edgar A. Poe. We have hitherto scarcely glanced at his poetry. It, although lying in a very short compass, is of various merit: it is an abridgment of the man in his strength and weakness. Its chief distinction, as a whole, from his prose, is its peculiar music. That, like all his powers, is fitful, changeful, varying; but not more so than to show the ever-varying moods of his mind, acting on a peculiar and indefinite theory of sound. The alpha and omega of that theory may be condensed in the word "reiteration." He knows the effect which can be produced by ringing changes

on particular words. The strength of all his strains consequently lies in their chorus, or "oure turn," as we call it in Scotland. We do not think that he could have succeeded in sustaining the harmonies or keeping up the interest of a large poem. But his short flights are exceedingly beautiful, and some of his poems are miracles of melody. All our readers are familiar with "The Raven." It is a dark world in itself; it rises in your sky suddenly as the cloud like a man's hand rose in the heaven of Palestine, and covers all the horizon with the blackness of darkness. As usual in his writings, it is but a common event idealised; there is nothing supernatural or even extraordinary in the incident recounted;-but the reiteration of the one dreary word "nevermore;" the effect produced by seating the solemn bird of yore upon the bust of Pallas; the manner in which the fowl with its fiery eyes becomes the evil conscience or memory of the lonely widower; and the management of the time, the season, and the circumstances-all unite in making the Raven in its flesh and blood a far more terrific apparition than ever from the shades made night hideous, while "revisiting the glimpses of the moon." The poem belongs to a singular class of poetic uniques, each of which is itself enough to make a reputation, such as Coleridge's "Rime of the Anciente Marinere," or Christabel," and Aird's "Devil's Dream upon Mount Acksbeck"-poems in which some one new and generally dark idea is wrought out into a whole so strikingly complete and self-contained as to resemble creation, and in which thought, imagery, language, and music combine to produce a similar effect, and are made to chime together like bells. What entireness of effect, for instance, is produced in the "Devil's Dream," by the unearthly theme, the strange title, the austere and terrible figures, the singular verse, and the knotty and contorted language; and in the "Rime of the Anciente Marinere," by the ghastly form of the narrator--the wild rythm, the new mythology, and the exotic diction of the tale he tells! So Poe's "Raven" has the unity of a tree blasted, trunk, and twigs, and root, by a flash of lightning. Never did melancholy more thoroughly "mark for its own" any poem than this. All is in intense keeping. Short as the poem is, it has a beginning, middle, and end. Its commencement how abrupt and striking--the

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time a December midnight-the poet a solitary man, sitting, "weak and weary," poring in helpless fixity, but with no profit or pleasure, over a black-letter volume; the fire half expired, and the dying embers haunted by their own ghosts, and shivering above the hearth! The middle is attained when the raven mounts the bust of Pallas, and is fascinating the solitary wretch by his black, glittering plumage, and his measured, melancholy croak. And the end closes as with the wings of night over the sorrow of the unfortunate, and these dark words conclude the tale:

"And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted Nevermore."

You feel as if the poem might have been penned by the finger of one of the damned.

The same shadow of unutterable wo rests upon several of his smaller poems, and the effect is greatly enhanced by their gay and song-like rhythm. That madness or misery which sings out its terror or grief, is always the most desperate. It is like a burden of hell set to an air of heaven. "Ulalume" might have been written by Coleridge during the sad middle portion of his life. There is a sense of dreariness and desolation as of the last of earth's autumns, which we find nowhere else in such perfection. What a picture these words convey to the imagination:

"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 Weir-

It was down by the dark tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

These to many will appear only words; but what wondrous words. What a spell they wield! Like a wasted haggard face, they have no bloom or beauty; but what a tale they tell! Weir-Auber-where are they? They exist not, except in the writer's imagination, and in yours, for the instant they are uttered, a misty picture, with a tarn, dark as a murderer's

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eye, below, and the last thin, yellow leaves of October fluttering above-exponents both of a misery which scorns the name of sorrow, and knows neither limit nor termination-is hung up in the chamber of your soul for ever. What power, too, there is in the "Haunted Palace," particularly in the last words, "They laugh, but smile no more!" Dante has nothing superior in all those chilly yet fervent words of his, where "the ground burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire."

We must now close our sketch of Poe; and we do so with feelings of wonder, pity, and awful sorrow, tempted to look up to heaven, and to cry, Lord, why didst thou make this man in vain ?" Yet perhaps there was even in him some latent spark of goodness, which may even now be developing itself under a kindlier sky. He has gone far away from the misty mid-region of Weir; his dreams of cosmogonies have been tested by the searching light of Eternity's truth; his errors have received the reward that was meet; and we cannot but say, ere we close, Peace even to the well-nigh putrid dust of Edgar A. Poe.

NO. VI. SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER.*

THE attention of the Scottish public has of late been strongly attracted to Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, through his visit to Edinburgh; and the elegant and scholarly addresses he delivered there. We propose taking the opportunity so lawfully and gracefully furnished by his recent appearances among us, to analyse again at some length, and in a critical yet kindly spirit, the leading elements of his literary character and genius.

Bulwer has been now twenty-seven years before the public, and has, during that period, filled almost every phase of authorship and of thought. He has been a critic, an editor a

*The Novels and Romances of Sir E. B. Lytton, Bart.

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