fiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchless
will' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her pained
apprehension birth and death and life are alike terrible. Only Webster's
dirge might have been said over her coffin.

What my soul bore my soul alone
Within itself may tell,

she says truthfully; but some of that long endurance of her life, in
which exile, the body's weakness, and a sense of some 'divinest anguish'
which clung about the world and all things living, had their share, she
was able to put into ascetic and passionate verse. It is sad-coloured
and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the
clouds that hang generally above it, a rare and stormy beauty comes into
the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendour.

1906.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

The poems of Edgar Allan Poe are the work of a poet who thought
persistently about poetry as an art, and would have reduced inspiration
to a method. At their best they are perfectly defined by Baudelaire,
when he says of Poe's poetry that it is a thing 'deep and shimmering as
dreams, mysterious and perfect as crystal.' Not all the poems, few as
they are, are flawless. In a few unequal poems we have the only
essential poetry which has yet come from America, Walt Whitman's vast
poetical nature having remained a nature only, not come to be an art.
Because Poe was fantastically inhuman, a conscious artist doing strange
things with strange materials, not every one has realised how fine, how
rare, was that beauty which this artist brought into the world. It is
true that there was in the genius of Poe something meretricious; it is
the flaw in his genius; but then he had genius, and Whittier and Bryant
and Longfellow and Lowell had only varying degrees of talent. Let us
admit, by all means, that a diamond is flawed; but need we compare it
with this and that fine specimen of quartz?

Poetry Poe defined as 'the rhythmical creation of beauty'; and the first
element of poetry he found in 'the thirst for supernal beauty.' 'It is
not,' he repeats, 'the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It is
a wild effort to reach the beauty above.... Inspired with a prescient
ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles by multiform
novelty of combination among the things and thoughts of time, to
anticipate some portions of that loveliness whose very elements,
perhaps, appertain solely to eternity.' The poet, then, 'shoul