e now see
it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby. * * * Its
character might have performed, in regard to that of the idiot,
much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect
to the air."

Nevertheless, after pointing out these germs and resemblances, the value of
this poem still is found in its originality. The progressive music, the
scenic detail and contrasted light and shade,--above all, the spiritual
passion of the nocturn, make it the work of an informing genius. As for the
gruesome bird, he is unlike all the other ravens of his clan, from the "twa
corbies" and "three ravens" of the balladists to Barnaby's rumpled "Grip."
Here is no semblance of the cawing rook that haunts ancestral turrets and
treads the field of heraldry; no boding phantom of which Tickell sang that,
when,

"shrieking at her window thrice,
The raven flap'd his wing,
Too well the love-lorn maiden knew
The solemn boding sound."

Poe's raven is a distinct conception; the incarnation of a mourner's agony
and hopelessness; a sable embodied Memory, the abiding chronicler of doom,
a type of the Irreparable. Escaped across the Styx, from "the Night's
Plutonian shore," he seems the imaged soul of the questioner himself,--of
him who can not, will not, quaff the kind nepenthe, because the memory of
Lenore is all that is left him, and with the surcease of his sorrow even
that would be put aside.

_The Raven_ also may be taken as a representative poem of its author, for
its exemplification of all his notions of what a poem should be. These are
found in his essays on "The Poetic Principle," "The Rationale of Verse,"
and "The Philosophy of Composition." Poe declared that "in Music, perhaps,
the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the
Poetic Sentiment, it struggles--the creation of supernal Beauty.... Verse
cannot be better designated than as an inferior or less capable music"; but
again, verse which is really the "Poetry of Words" is "The Rhythmical
Creation of Beauty,"--this and nothing more. The _tone_ of the highest
Beauty is one of Sadness. The most melancholy of topics is Death. This must
be allied to Beauty. "The death, then, of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,--and equally is it
beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a
bereaved lover." These last expressions are