thing that can hardly
be tempered down to the quiet stanzas of Gray's Elegy. But it is not
in itself a wicked thing; or the world would never have consecrated
it in the great Love-Legends. One may admit that the entrance of the
Nubian Executioner changes the situation; but, after all, the frenzy
of the girl's request--the terror of that Head upon the silver
charger--were implicit in her passion from the beginning; and are,
God knows! never very far from passion of that kind.

But all this is changed when we come to Edgar Allen Poe. Here we
are no longer in Troy or Antioch or Canopus or Rimini. Here it is
not any more a question of ungovernable passion carried to the limit
of madness. Here it is no more the human, too human, tradition of
each man "killing" the "thing he loves." Here we are in a world
where the human element, in passion, has altogether departed, and
left something else in its place; something which is really, in the true
sense, "inhumanly immoral." In the first place, it is a thing devoid of
any physical emotion. It is sterile, immaterial, unearthly, ice-cold. In
the second place, it is, in a ghastly sense, self-centered! It feeds upon
itself. It subdues everything to itself. Finally, let it be said, it is a
thing with a mania for Corruption. The Charnel-House is its bridal-couch,
and the midnight stars whisper to one another of its perversion.
There is no need for it "to kill the thing it loves," for it
loves only what is already dead. _Favete linguis!_ There must be no
profane misinterpretation of this subtle and delicate difference. In
analysing the evasive chemistry of a great poet's mood, one moves
warily, reverently, among a thousand betrayals. The mind of such a
being is as the sand-strewn floor of a deep sea. In this sea we poor
divers for pearls, and _stranger things,_ must hold our breath long
and long, as we watch the great glittering fish go sailing by, and
touch the trailing, rose-coloured weeds, and cross the buried coral. It
may be that no one will believe us, when we return, about what we
have seen! About those carcanets of rubies round drowned throats
and those opals that shimmered and gleamed in dead men's skulls!

At any rate, the most superficial critic of Poe's poetry must admit
that every single one of his great verses, except the little one "to
Helen," is pre-occupied with Death. Even in that Helen one, perhaps
the loveliest, though, I do not think, the most _characteristic,_ of al