d limit
his endeavours to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, in
colour, in sound, in sentiment.' Note the emphasis upon novel: to Poe
there was no beauty without strangeness. He makes his favourite
quotation: '"But," says Lord Bacon (how justly!) "there is no exquisite
beauty without some strangeness in the proportions." Take away this
element of strangeness--of unexpectedness--of novelty--of
originality--call it what we will--and all that is ethereal in
loveliness is lost at once.... We lose, in short, all that assimilates
the beauty of earth with what we dream of the beauty of heaven!' And, as
another of the elements of this creation of beauty, there must be
indefiniteness. 'I _know_,' he says, 'that indefiniteness is an element
of the true music--I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any
undue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you deprive
it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential
character.' Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine's
'Art Poetique': '_Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance_'? And is not the
essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarme and of the French
Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that class
of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current
of meaning an under or _suggestive_ one'? To this 'mystic or secondary
impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in
music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always
a distinct, but an august soul-exalting _echo_.' Has anything that has
been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of
verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more subtly or
more precisely?

And Poe does not end here, with what may seem generalities. 'Beyond the
limits of beauty,' he says of poetry, 'its province does not extend. Its
sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has
only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally,
upon either Duty or Truth.' And of the poet who said, not meaning
anything very different from what Poe meant, 'Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,' he says: 'He is the sole British poet who has never erred in
his themes.' And, as if still thinking of Keats, he says: 'It is chiefly
amid forms of physical loveliness (we use the word _forms_ in its widest
sense as embracing modifications of sound and colour) that the