But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber' Wretch.' I cried, 'thy God hath lent thee-by these andoorgels he hath sent thee Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber Respite-respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Le door nore! "Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked, upstarting 'Get thee back into the tempest, and the Night's Plutonian shore ! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken!-quit the bust above my door! "Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, 'Doubtless,' said I, 'what it utters is its only stock and Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Dis aster Followed fast and followed faster, till his songs one bur- Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore "But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling, Then, upon the velvet sinking, 1 betook myself to linking Meant in croaking 'Nevermore.' off my door!' The rhythm of this poem is exquisite, its phraseology is in the highest degree musical and apt, the tone of the whole is wonderfully sustained and appropriate to the subject, which, full as it is of a “This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing wild and tender melancholy, is admirably well chosen. This is my honest judgment; I am fortified This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease re-in it by high authority. Mr. Willis says:-"It is clining the most effective single example of fugitive poeOn the cushion's velvet lining, that the lamp-light gloated try ever published in this country and unsurpassed To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core ; o'er, But whose velvet violet lining, with the lamp-light gloat-in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ing o'er, She shall press, ah, nevermore! Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by angels, whose faint foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative lift. It is one of those dainties which we feed on. It will stick to the memory of every one who reads it." Miss Barrett says:-" This vivid writing!—this power which is felt! The Raven' has produced a sensation-a' fit horror' here in England. Some like touches-for giving an air of remarkable natof my friends are taken by the fear of it, and some uralness and truth to whatever he paints. Some by the music. I hear of persons haunted by the of his stories, written many years ago, are wonNevermore, and one acquaintance of mine, who has derful in this fidelity and distinctness of portraitthe misfortune of possessing a 'bust of Pallas,' | ure ; "Hans Phaal," "a descent into the Maelnever can bear to look at it in the twilight. Our strom," and "MS. found in a bottle," shew it in great poet, Mr. Browning, author of Paracelsus, an eminent degree. In the first of these a jouretc., is enthusiastic in his admiration of the rhythm. ney to the moon is described with the fullness and Then there is a tale of his which I do particularity of an ordinary traveller's journal; ennot find in this volume, but which is going the tries, astronomical and thermical, and, on reaching rounds of the newspapers, about mesmerism, throw-the moon, botanical, and zoological, are made with ing us all into most admired disorder, or dreadful an inimitable matter-of-fact air. In a descent into doubts as to whether it can be true, as the children say of ghost stories. The certain thing in the tale in question is the power of the writer, and the faculty he has of making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar." The prose narrative, "M. Valdemar's case"the story of which Miss Barrett speaks-is the most truth-like representation of the impossible ever written. M. Valdemar is mesmerized in articulo mortis. Months pass away, during which he appears to be in mesmeric sleep; the mesmeric influence is withdrawn, and instantly his body becomes putrid and loathsome-he has been many months dead. Will the reader believe that men were found to credit this wild story? and yet some very respectable people believed in its truth firmly. The editor of the Baltimore Visiter republished it as a statement of facts, and was at the pains to vouch for Mr. Poe's veracity. If the letter of a Mr. Collier, published just after the original appearance of the story, was not a quiz, he also fell into the same trap. I understand that some foreign mesmeric journals, German and French, reprinted it as being what it purported to be-a true account of mesmeric phenomena. That many others were deceived in like manner by this strange tale, in which, as Miss Barrett says, "the wonder and question are, can it be true,” is very probable. the Maelstrom you are made fairly to feel yourself on the descending round of the vortex, convoying fleets of drift timber, and fragments of wrecks: the terrible whirl makes you giddy as you read. In the MS. found in a bottle we have a story as wild as the mind of man ever conceived, and yet made to souud like the most matter-of-fact veracious narrative of a seaman, But in Mr. Poe, the peculiar talent to which we are indebted for Robinson Crusoe, and the memoirs of Captain Monroe, has an addition. Truthlike as Nature itself, his strange fictions show constantly the presence of a singularly adventurons, very wild, and thoroughly poetic imagination. Some sentences from them, which always impressed me deeply, will give full evidence of the success with which this rare imaginative power is made to adorn and ennoble his truthlike pictures. Take this passage from Ligeia, a wonderful story, written to show the triumph of the human will even over death. Ligeia, in whom the struggle between the will to live, and the power of death, has seemed to terminate in a defeat of the passionate will, is consigned to the tomb. Her husband marries a second wife, "the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena." By the sick bed of this second wife, who is dying from some mysterious cause, he sits. With Mr. Poe's more recent productions I am "I sat by the side of her ebony bed, upon one not at all acquainted-excepting a review of Miss of the ottomans of India. She partly arose, and Barrett's works, and an essay on the philosophy of spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of sounds which composition. The first of these contains a great she then heard, but which I could not hear, of modeal of noble writing and excellent criticism; the tions which she then saw, but which I could not last is an admirable specimen of analysis. I be-perceive. The wind was rushing hurriedly behind lieve Mr. P. has been for some time ill-has rethe tapestries, and I wished to show her (what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those cently sustained a heavy domestic bereavement-faint, almost inarticulate breathings and the very and is only now returning to his literary labors. gentle variations of the figures upon the wall were The public will doubtless welcome the return of so but the natural effects of that customary rushing of favorite an author to pursuits in which heretofore the wind. But, a deadly pallor, overspreading her he has done so much and so well. Unnecessary as the labor may be, I will not conclude this postscript to Mr. Lowel's memoir, without making some remarks upon Mr. Poe's genius and writings generally. Mr. P's most distinguishing power is that which made the extravagant fiction of M. Valdemar's case sound like truth. He has De Foe's peculiar talent for filling up his pictures with minute life face, had proved to me that my exertions to reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be fainting, and no attendants were within call. I remembered where was deposited a decanter of some light wine which had been ordered by her physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of a startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpable object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw that there lay a faint, indefinite shadow upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich real, lead him! Led by it he loves to adventure lostre thrown from the censer. Finding into what in one of his poems he calls the wine, I recrossed the chamber and poured out a goblet-full, which I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now, however, partially recov ered, and took, herself, the vessel, while I sank upon the ottoman near me, with my eyes rivetted upon her person. It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle foot-fall upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips. I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby-colored fluid." "a wild weird clime Out of space, out of time; deals in mysteries of "life in death," dissects monomanias, exhibits convulsions of soul—in a word, wholly leaves beneath and behind him the wide and happy realm of the common cheerful life of man. That he would be a greater favorite with the majority of readers if he brought his singular capacity for vivid and truthlike narrative to bear on subjects nearer ordinary life, and of a more cheerAgain take this passage from the Fall of the ful and happy character, does not I think admit of House of Usher: a doubt. But whether with the few he is not all the more appreciable from the difficult nature of "From that chamber, and from that mansion, I filed aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its the fields which he has principally chosen, is queswrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. tionable. For what he has done, many of the best Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, minds of America, England and France, have and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual awarded him praise; labors of a tamer nature might could have issued-for the vast house and its sha- not have won it from such sources. For my indidows were alone behind me. The radiance was vidual part, having the seventy or more tales, anathat of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-dis-lytic, mystic, grotesque, arabesque, always woncernible fissure of which I have before spoken, as derful, often great, which his industry and fertility extending fram the roof of the building, in a zig-have already given us, I would like to read one zag direction to the base." cheerful book made by his invention, with little or no aid from its twin brother imagination—a book These quoted passages-the "white and ghastly in his admirable style of full, minute, never tedious spectrum of the teeth" in "Berenice"--the visible narrative-a book full of homely doings, of successvulture eye, and audible heart-beat in the "Tell-ful toils, of ingenious shifts and contrivances, of rudtale Heart"—the resemblance in "Morella" of the dy firesides-a book healthy and happy throughout, living child to the dead mother, becoming gradual- and with no poetry in it at all anywhere, except a ly fearful, until the haunting eyes gleam out a ter- good old English "poetic justice" in the end. Such rible identity, and prove as in Ligeia the final con- a book, such as Mr. Poe could make it, would be quest of the will over death-these and a thousand a book for the million, and if it did nothing to exalt such clinging ideas, which Mr. P.'s writings abound him with the few, would yet certainly endear him in, prove indisputably that the fires of a great poet to them. are seething under those analytic and narrative powers in which no living writer equals him. Mr. Lowell has gone deeply and discriminatingly into Mr. Poe's merits as a poet. Any elaborate This added gift of a daring and wild imagination remarks of mine on the same subject would be out is the source of much of the difference between of place here. I will not, however, lose this opour author and De Foe. De Foe loves and deals portunity of expressing an admiration which I have always with the homely. Mr. Poe is nervously long entertained of the singular mastery of certain afraid of the homely-has a creed that Beauty is externals of his art which he everywhere exhibits the goddess of the Poet :-not Beauty with swell-in his verse. His rhythm, and his vocabulary, or ing bust, and lascivious carriage, exciting passions phraseology, are perhaps perfect. The reader has of the blood, but Beauty sublimated and cherished by the soul-the beauty of the Uranian, not Dionean Venus. De Foe gives us in the cheerful and delightful story of his colonist of the desert isles, (which has as sure a locality in a million minds as any genuine island has upon the maps,) a clear, plain, true-sounding narrative of matters that might occur any day. His love for the real makes him do so. The "real" of such a picture has not strangeness enough in its proportions for Mr. Poe's imagination; and, with the same talent for truthlike narrative, to what different results of creation "The sweet Lenore hath gone before, with hope that flew does not this imagination, scornful of the soberly perceived the beauty of the rhythm in The Raven. Some other verses from poems to which Mr. Lowell has referred, are quite as remarkable for this beauty. Read these verses from Lenore "Come let the burial rite be read-the funeral song be An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young- beside, Leaving thee wild, for the dear child, that should have been thy bride For her the fair, and debonair, that now so lowly lies, LINES, The life upon her yellow hair, but not within her eyes The life still there upon her hair,--the death upon her eyes. On beholding the Picture of L. E. L. prefixed to her Poetical Works. BY ELIZABETH J. EAMES. Avaunt to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise, But waft the angel on her flight with a Pæan of old days! "They learn in suffering what they teach in song."-Shelly. I. And take these, in the most graceful of all mea-O, yes! thou wert the Lyre's transcendant Queen, sures-they are from "To one in Paradise." I must conclude these insufficient remarks upon a writer worthy of high and honorable place amongst the leading creative minds of the age. As regards the Wiley & Putnam publication of Mr. Poe's tales-a volume by which his rare literary claims have been most recently presented to the public-I think the book in some respects does him injustice. It contains twelve tales out of more than seventy; and it is made up almost wholly of what may be called his analytic tales. This is not representing the author's mind in its various phases. A reader gathering his knowledge of Mr. Poe from this Wiley & Putnam issue would perceive nothing of the diversity and variety for which his writings are in fact remarkable. Only the publication of all his stories, at one issue, in one book, would show this diversity and variety in their full force; but much more might have been done to represent his mind by a judicious and not wholly one-toned selection. Bright child of beauty, poesy and song. On fancy's radiant pinions borne along And crowned with the Laurel's glorious green. Fair Poetess! in these illumin'd pages The spirit of thy song if fitly shrin'd:With the sweet minstrelsy of parted ages Shall thy soft strains by flowery links he twin'd. Meanwhile I pause to dwell on the dim sadness That breathes in under-tones through all thy laysOh! fell there o'er the sunshine of thy gladness Even 'midst thy boding fears of dreary destiny, A shadow haunting thee of darker days! Could'st thou have dreamed that fate held such dark doom for thee? II. That thou a bride should'st cross the Eastern wave, Of this thou did'st not dream, and prophecy. From thy rich harp, while yet the harmony I feel that happier they to whom belong GREY HAIRS. Unbidden guests why come ye here, A gloom upon my spirit steal; Yet I will pause, and calmly scan, Full plainly of these changes speak. From sorrow's streams such golden grains. From year to year, with patient toil, Then why repine that Nature dooms I bow submissive to our sway. I would not give the thoughts you bring NAPOLEON'S CAPTIVITY. * 66 Very soon every man had his own theory of Napoleon. The hypothesis of this one was ge|nius," of that "good fortune." This one accorded to him lofty qualities and pronounced a hearty apotheosis, while that, with the self-same facts before him, recognized in him only a man of insatiate ambition, rushing with demoniac fury to the annihilation of peace and order and liberty, and quickly denounced him to Hades. The contest still goes on as vigorously as of old, though unquestionably more calmly. Partisan discussion has given way to philosophic debate, and the career of Bonaparte is about, we do not doubt, ere long to be written down into immutable History. We are not about to attempt any thing new upon a theme at once so trite and so lofty, non nostrum tantas and yet fairly to present the claims of the Book under the title of which we write, it is indispensable that something should be said. As a great moral study, awakening the profoundest emotions of the heart and challenging the acutest faculties of the mind, a prodigy, a wonder, a mystery, and yet a mortal, feeble as ourselves when touched by the power of the Eternal, the Exile of St. Helena must and will ever stand out in history marked, distinctive, unapproachable. Lieutenant, General, triumphant hero, Consul, Legislator, master of Europe, Emperor, what a gradation of rapid and unequalled successes, and from what beginnings! who is comparable to him? Alexander was young, but he inherited a throne. He acquired magnificent power and swayed well nigh a The craving after information concerning Bo-world, but the momentum with which he set out, naparte is not less intense now, that a quarter of a done nothing to erect for himself, gave him a comthe point from which he started, and which he had century has passed away since he yielded up his life like the commonest mortal, than it was when paratively easy and natural dominion over the nations he conquered. He sprang from a lofty he breathed and lived a monarch, encircled with the “iron crown" and setting upon the thrones of point to points still higher. But the cadet of BriCharlemagne and of Cæsar. This is natural, the enne! If Cæsar be allowed to stand for a conworld stood awe-struck and amazed at the brilliant trast, be it remembered Bonaparte closed his caCæsar had meteor, that rising out of confusion and night, shot reer at the age that Cæsar began his. all the advantages of social position and patrician athwart the sky, irradiating its nethermost limits, and had time only when that meteor had sunk again barbarians with the proud cohorts of the mistress birth. He encountered on the field mostly, uncouth into nothingness and night, to speculate upon the phenomenon it had beheld: then indeed awaking leon met on every field the best troops that comof the world. His battles were few, while Napoas if from a stupor, it began that searching enquiry into the minutest details of his history, which is bined Europe could produce, cheered with the fame still unended, now clutched at every fragment of and inflamed by the transmitted skill of Frederick information concerning him,-his birth, his and Marlborough. The odds of numbers, taken parentage, his personal and moral character; his victoin the average, were so great against him as to ries, his defeats, his civil labors and his diplomahave justified his courage had he declined to deliver battle. What a multiplicity of fields he cy, every possible source was eagerly explored,—nothing was too minute,-numerous were the fought-Italy, Belgium, Egypt, Spain and Russia-truths, numerous the falsehoods that were publishalmost from Cancer to Capricorn-in the hot breath of summer and in the rude winter blast. The hero ed to the world. of the Sections, of Lodi, Marengo, Austerlitz and the Pyramids will be in all ages a great military study. History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St. Helena. By General Count Montholon, the Emperor's Companion in Exile and Testamentary Executor. E. Ferrett & Co. New York, &c. 1846. The treaties of Campo Formio, Tilsit, Amiens, and the Concordat will ever claim for him the con |