Usher," is wilder and profounder than the introduction to Der Freyschutz: a tract of country excessively wild and desolate, where no trace of a human footstep was to be seen. Legrand led the way with decisDuring the whole of a dull, dark, and sound-ion; pausing only for an instant, here and there less day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing along on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say, insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me-upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain; upon the bleak walls; upon the vacant eye-like windows; upon a few rank sedges; and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees; with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the revelfer upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life; the hideous dropping off the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart; an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it; I paused to think; what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as 1 pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possble, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and acting upon this idea I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before---upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows." What a Salvator Rosa-like landscape is that which occurs in the course of "The Gold Bug :" to consult what appeared to be certain landmarks of his own contrivance upon a former occasion. In this manner we journeyed for about two hours, and the sun was just setting when we entered a region infinitely more dreary than any yet seen. It was a species of table land, near the summit of an almost inaccessible hill, densely wooded from base to pinnacle, and interspersed with huge crags that appeared to lie loosely upon the soil, and in many cases were prevented from precipitating themselves into the valleys below, merely by the support of the trees against which they reclined. Deep ravines in various directions, gave an air of still sterner solemnity to the scene." And in the "M.S. found in a bottle," we have a sea view from an ocean that had not been visited before, since the voyage of the Ancient Mariner : "Our course for the first four days was, with trifling variations, S. E. and by S.; and we must have run down the coast of New Holland. On the fifth day the cold became extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the northward. The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon, emitting no decisive light. There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver like rim alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean." It is good to remain as child-like in our perceptions and affections as we can. Childinterest them and nothing comes amiss. dren are the most catholic of readers: only One who can, like them, pass from the lively dialogue of Dumas, to these pictures of concentrated mysterious apprehension, and find amusement in both, will be likely never to die of ennui. Many of these tales, if not all, were hast"We crossed the creek at the head of the is-ily written, and, they are therefore often land by means of a skiff, and, ascending the fragmentary and imperfect. Sometimes high grounds on the shore of the main land, the plot is too obvious and the secret is out proceeded in a northwesterly direction, through too soon; in others, the particular horror is too horrible to be contemplated, however artistically it might be veiled. But in all, wherever Poe gives his dreaming fancy any play, it never fails to paint vividly. Take its pictures altogether, and they belong to a new school of grotesque diablerie. They are original in their gloom, their occasional humor, their peculiar picturesqueness, their style, and their construction and machinery. Of their gloom we have just spoken. The balloon of Han's Pfaall, seen by the citizens of Rotterdam, and made of dirty newspapers, is a touch of Poe's original playfulness. So also the negro in the "Gold Bug;" the "Balloon Hoax," is the work of a born quiz; "Some words with a Mummy," "Hop Frog," Bon Bon," "The Devil in the Belfrey," "Lionizing," and many more, show how full he naturally was of boyish feeling. They are mere trifles to please children; but then he was a child who wrote them--he never got over being a child. blood-red metal, its upper end lost, like the city of Boston, parmi les nues." In the "Rationale of Verse," a not very clear essay, but one abounding in acute suggestion, we have plenty of examples of a like pleasant sarcasm. Indeed, throughout these writings there is enough to show that their author, as is generally true of such spirits, was no less sensitive to the laughable than to the horrible. Indeed, had life gone happily with him, it is possible he might have been only known as one of the gay spirits of fashionable society. With respect to Poe's style, the extracts above given from "The Gold Bug," "the M.S. found in a bottle," &c., exhibit his affluence of musical variety in expression, and command of words. One more extract we must give, not only for its eloquence, but in illustration of our theory, that Poe was one originally so sensitive, the first breath of the world withered him; so that he was benumbed, and fan cied he had outlived his heart : The fate of Mr. Toby Dammit, in the sketch "Never bet the Devil your Head," "She whom I loved in youth, and of whom is an awful warning-one which even now I now pen calmly and distinctly these rememit is impossible to contemplate without brances, was the sole daughter of the only emotion. He bet the Devil his head that sister of my mother long departed. Eleonora he could leap over a certain stile; it hap-dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the was the name of my cousin. We had always pened that above the stile was a thin flat Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. No unbar of iron, which he did not perceive, and guided footstep ever came upon that vale: for which shaved his head clean off. Our author it lay far away up among a range of giant gives the conclusion : hills that hung beetling around about it, shutting out the sunlight from its sweetest recess "He did not long survive his terrible loss. The homeopathists did not give him little enough physic, and what little they did give him he hesitated to take. So in the end he grew worse, and at length died, a lesson to all riotous livers. I bedewed his grave with my tears, worked a bar sinister on his family escutcheon, and for the general expenses of his funeral, sent in my very moderate bill to the transcendentalists. The scoundrels refused to pay it, so I had Mr. Dammit dug up at once, and sold him for dog's meat." What a bold comparison we have in "The Duc de L'Omelette," where the hero is taken by Baal-Zebub into the enchanted chamber. "It was not its length nor its breadth, but its height; oh, that was appalling! There was no ceiling, certainly none; but a dense whirling mass of fiery colored clouds. His Grace's brain reeled as he glanced upwards. From above hung a chain of an unknown es. No path was trodden in its vicinity; and to reach our happy home, there was need of putting back with force, the foliage of many thousands of forest trees, and of crushing to death the glories of many millions of fragrant flowers. Thus it was that we lived all alone, knowing nothing of the world without the valley,-I, and my cousin, and her mother. "From the dim regions beyond the mountains at the upper end of our encircled domain, there crept out a narrow and deep river, brighter than all save the eyes of Eleonora ; and winding stealthily about in mazy courses, it passed away at length, through a shadowy gorge, among hills still dimmer than those whence it had issued. We called it the "River of Silence; for there seemed to be a hushing influence in its flow. No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that the pearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom, stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously for ever. "The margin of the river, and of the many dazzling rivulets that glided through devious ways into its channel, as well as the spaces that extended from the margins away down into the depths of the streams, until they reached the bed of pebbles at the bottom, these spots, not less than the whole surface of the valley, from the river to the mountains that girdled it in, were carpeted all by a soft green grass, thick, short, perfectly even, and vanilla-perfumed, but so besprinkled throughout with the yellow buttercup, the white daisy, the purple violet, and the ruby-red asphodel, that its exceeding beauty spoke to our hearts in loud tones, of the love and of the glory of God." Poor Poe! It was a sad day for him when he was forced from dreams like these into the real world, where there are so many "far wiser" than he. No wonder he sometimes lost heart and temper, and soon died! We have observed that Poe is original, not only in his gloom, his humor, and so forth, but also in the construction of his tales. Indeed, it is for this he has been most found fault with. It is said he wrote his things" on a plan." It is not denied that he contrives to get up an interest; but it is objected that he does it systematically, foreseeing the end from the beginning, laying out his work, and deliberately going through it. on a up, and to which more may be joined; it Why because the present day seems to abound in little writers, who make much noise, but whose minds have no strength, no connection of ideas; no dependence of thought upon thought; nothing that enchains the reader, and goes on developing, from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and page to page. We have many among us of this stamp, whom it is impossible to read without confusion. Of course all such are the natural foes of order, prolonged interest, and grand emotion. They wish to go from thing to thing; to feel only themselves; to smatter, and dogmatize, and talk-talk-talk. O, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable is all they have to utter! But is not this really an argument in Again; it has been objected to Poe's his favor? The painter composes (C stories and poems, that they are abstract, plan;" he touches not his canvas till his unlike anything in real life, out of all exwhole design is sketched, or laid out per- perience, and touching no human sympafectly, in his mind; he must do so. Still thy. As to the abstractness and remotemore is this true (though we are aware it ness from experience, if these be faults, is not generally thought so) with the musi- God help the wicked! for the author of cal composer; everything is so calculated Paradise Lost is surely damned; but as to beforehand, the composition may be said to their coldness and incapacity to touch exist in his mind, exactly in reverse order; human sympathy, that we utterly deny. in the freest style, the climax is the first We are unable to perceive, from these thing conceived, and to which the rest is harmless little sketches and verses, a reaadjusted. And in writing plays, must not son for all that has been said of Poe's coldthe plot be first established, and then elabo- heartedness, "cynicism," want of moral rated? Does any one suppose that Shaks- sense, and so on. It must be admitted, peare did not foreknow the action of Hamlet, however, that if the friendship manifested when he sat himself to write it? or that in these biographical prefixes was the he improvised Macbeth? or that he could warmest he could inspire, he was certainly elaborate that singular texture of plots, the one of the most unfortunate men that ever Midsummer Night's Dream, by the Dumas lived. But to judge him purely as he approcess of accretion? Surely those who pears in his own writing, we do not see but think SO cannot understand any, the that he had as much "heart" as other men simplest work of art, in its entirety. For a work of art is not a heap of things built as much, at least, as other literary men who have resided as long as he did in this All these objections and accusations appear to us to have arisen from two sources; first, his success in gaining, at once, what so many would give their eyes for, viz. : a reputation; and, secondly, his frankness, or want of self-respect. This leads us to speak of his poetry, and of what he has related respecting his mode of writing it. Coleridge, speaking of some of his own poems, observes: "In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical ballads ;' in which it was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or, at least, romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest, and a semblance of truth, sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." "With this view I wrote the 'Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other poems, the Dark Ladie,' and the Christobel,' in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt.". From this extract we learn that even that most fanciful of modern poems, the "Ancient Mariner," was written in conformity with a specific purpose, if not "on a plan." Doubtless, also, had it served its author's purpose to enlighten us concerning the manner of his composition, he could have done so; for, the existence of a design argues forethought in execution. How certain words, rhymes, and similes came into his mind, he could not have told; but why he chose that peculiar metre, or, at least, that he chose a metre, he could have told, and also many other incidents of the poem's composition. Poe has done this with regard to "The Raven;" a much shorter piece, and one admitting a more regular ingenuity of construction-but still a poem full of singular beauty. His opening remarks in this analysis show the perfect frankness, or indiffer ence with which he sets to work to dispel his own conjurations : "I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would---that is to say, who could---detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say---but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers--poets in especial ---prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy---an ecstatic intuition--and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought---at the true purposes seized only at the last moment---at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view--at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable--at the cautious selections and rejections---at the painful erasures and interpolations---in a word, at the wheels and pinions---the tackle for scene-shifting---the step-ladders and demon-traps---the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.”. In what follows, wherein he goes minutely into his process of composition, though, in general, true, he was probably misled by the character of his mind, his love of speculation, his impatience of littleness, the perverseness?' we have claimed for him, and a secret delight in mystifying the foolish-to make it appear that he wrote the whole poem, as he would have demonstrated a problem, and without experiencing any state or phase of elevated feeling. The poem itself is so sufficient an evidence to the contrary, and Poe, in his explanation, in its mode of construction, "The Philosophy of Composition," has carried his analysis to such an absurd minuteness, that it is a little suprising there should be any verdant enough not to perceive he was "chaffing." He was enough a boy in his feelings to take delight in quizzing. What are most of his stories, but harmless hoaxes? Horrible faces grin at us in them out of the darkness; but at the end comes the author, shews them to be nothing but pumpkin lanterns, and cries "sold!" in our faces. Probably there is not, in all poetry or prose, an instance where language is made to present a more vivid picture to the fancy than in this poem. The mysterious introduction, the tapping," the appearance of the Raven, and all his doings and sayings, are so perfectly in character, (we were once, many years ago, the " unhappy master" of one of these birds, who, it was evident, were in league with the devil,) that we seem actually to see him: "Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore, Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Quoth the Raven, Nevermore." " And, as imagination bodies forth The "stately Raven," coming in with " Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from Tell me what thy lordly name is ON THE NIGHT'S -where is this "Nightly shore," which The natural expression of intense or elevated feeling is music. Hence in all Perhaps Poe would tell us that, in wri-poetry which has this characteristic, (and ting these stanzas, having determined, upon all poetry has it in greater or less degree,) good reasons, to introduce the Raven in language is used with a power independent some fantastic manner, he then considered of its meaning to the understanding. The what motions a bird of that species would musical expression strives to predominate; be likely to make, and finally concluded to and it is so ardent that it can even color choose the most natural, as being the most with its fiery glow the cold and unmelofantastic; and thus, at length, after look- dious sounds of articulate speech; under ing his dictionary, pitched upon the word its influence the syllables of words fall into "flirt," which Johnson defines to mean rythmic forms, and the mere confined "a quick, elastic motion," as most suited range of the vowel sounds and the ordinary to his purpose; then, finally, connected inflections of sentences, become a chant. with it flutter," not so much to add to the meaning, as for the convenience of the rhyme with "shutter." And for such harmless "philosophy of composition" as this, he must be set down for a man of no heart! To our apprehension, it is quite impossible that most of the words and phrases in these two stanzas could have been chosen in any other than an elevated state of feeling-a condition when "The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, Per In Shakspeare, the understanding was so alert that it rarely yields to the feeling, without evidence of a mighty conflict; generally the result is rather a thought-exciting struggle than a triumphant victory. haps there is no instance in his blank verse, where the musical expression so entirely overpowers the other, that words have a sense entirely independent of their meaning. But then how beautifully both effects are sometimes blended: "The murmuring surge, That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high." |