As the angel Israfel,

THE CITY IN THE SEA

And the giddy stars (so legends tell) Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice, all mute.

Tottering above

In her highest noon, The enamored moon Blushes with love,

While, to listen, the red levin

(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.

ΤΟ

20

30

40

49

While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky.

1831.

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.

Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently

Gleams up the pinnacles far and free -
Up domes up spires-up kingly halls –
Up fanes
up Babylon-like walls
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers -
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathèd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

So blend the turrets and shadows there

That all seem pendulous in air,

While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye-
Not the gayly-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass-
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea —
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!

The wave there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,

In slightly sinking, the dull tide
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow
The hours are breathing faint and low

10

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30

40

AT midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.

The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!- and lo! where lies
Irene, with her Destinies!

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1 Poe says in a letter, probably of 1845: Your appreciation of "The Sleeper" delights me. In the higher qualities of poetry it is better than "The Raven;" but there is not one man in a million who could be brought to agree with me in this opinion. "The Raven" of course, is far the better as a work of art; but in the true basis of all art, "The Sleeper" is the superior. I wrote the latter when quite a boy'

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold
Some vault that oft hath flung its black
And winged panels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o'er the crested palls,
Of her grand family funerals
Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone-
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne'er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.

LENORE 2

60

1831,

Aн, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!

2 The first and third stanzas are supposed to be spoken by the wretches,' relatives or false friends of Lenore; the second and fourth stanzas by Guy De Vere, her lover.

In this one case, perhaps, Poe's latest version is not so good as an earlier one. The form of Lenore published in 1843 is given below for comparison.

Ah, broken is the golden bowl!
The spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll!- A saintly soul
Glides down the Stygian river!
And let the burial rite be read-
The funeral song be sung-
A dirge for the most lovely dead
That ever died so young!
And, Guy De Vere,

Hast thou no tear?

Weep now or nevermore !

See, on yon drear

And rigid bier,

Low lies thy love Lenore!

Yon heir, whose cheeks of pallid hue
With tears are streaming wet,

Sees only, through

Their crocodile dew,

A vacant coronet

False friends! ye loved her for her wealth And hated her for her pride,

And, when she fell in feeble health,

Ye blessed her that she died.

How shall the ritual, then, be read?

The requiem how be sung

For her most wrong'd of all the dead
That ever died so young?'

FAIR isle, that from the fairest of all flowers,

Thy gentlest of all gentle names dost take! 3

How many memories of what radiant hours At sight of thee and thine at once awake! How many scenes of what departed bliss! How many thoughts of what entombed hopes!

How many visions of a maiden that is No more no more upon thy verdant slopes !

No more! alas, that magical sad sound Transforming all! Thy charms shall please no more—

Thy memory no more! Accursed ground Henceforth I hold thy flower-enamelled

3 Je souscris à ses noms d'Isola d'oro, de Fior di Levante. Ce nom de fleur me rappelle que l'hyacinthe était originaire de l'île de Zante, et que cette fle reçut son nom de la plante qu'elle avait portée. (CHATEAUBRIAND, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem.)

4 This poem is a part of Poe's tale of the Fall of the House of Usher,' which should be read entire. Lowell calls it one of the most beautiful of his poems,' and goes on: 'It loses greatly by being taken out of its rich and appropriate setting We know no modern poet who might not have been justly proud of it.... Was ever the wreck and desolation of a noble mind so musically sung? By the "Haunted Palace" I mean to imply a mind haunted by phantoms-a disordered brain,' says Poe himself, in a letter in which he also accuses Longfellow of plagiarizing from this poem in the Beleaguered City.'

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily, -
By the mountains-near the river
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,
By the gray woods, by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp,
By the dismal tarns and pools

Where dwell the Ghouls, -
By each spot the most unholy -
In each nook most melancholy, -
There the traveller meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past-
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by-

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30

White-robed forms of friends long given, In agony, to the Earth- and Heaven.

40

For the heart whose woes are legion
"T is a peaceful, soothing region -
For the spirit that walks in shadow
"T isoh 't is an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not dare not openly view it;
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosed;
So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringèd lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly
From this ultimate dim Thule.

THE RAVEN1

1844.

ONCE upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore

1 In connection with the 'Raven' Poe's Philosophy of Composition' must be read. See also: Ingram (John H.), The Raven, London, 1885. Benton (Joel), In the Poe Circle. Kent (Charles W.), Poe and Chivers' (in the Virginia Edition of Poe's Works, vol. vii, pp. 266-288). Woodberry (G. E.), The PoeChivers Papers' (in the Century, January and February, 1903). Newcomer (A. G.), The Poe-Chivers Tradition re-examined' (in the Sewanee Review, January, 1904.) Stedman (E. C.), The Raven, illustrated by Doré, with comment by E. C. Stedman.

Whether or not Poe in the 'Raven' owed anything to Chivers, he unquestionably, as Mr. Stedman has pointed out, owed less to Chivers than to Mrs. Browning. With the beginning of Poe's third stanza,

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain,'

compare Mrs. Browning's fourth stanza in the Conclusion of Lady Geraldine's Courtship,

With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air the purple curtain

Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows.

While the gliding of the river sends a rippling noise for ever Through the open casement whitened by the moonlight's slant repose."

Here, if we use the method adopted by Poe in his arraignment of Longfellow and his attack on Longfellow's defenders, where he insists that rhythm, metre, and stanza must form an essential part of any comparison, and that the probability of imitation is in direct ratio to the brevity of the passages compared as well as to the number of coincidences, it would be easy to show that Poe has followed, or as he would say plagiarized