The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,

Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride;

For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly

lies,

The life upon her yellow hair, but not within her

eyes,―

The life still there upon her hair, the death upon her eyes.

IV.

"Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,

But waft the angel on her flight with a pæan of old

days.

Let no bell toll; lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,

Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned earth.

To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven;

From hell unto a high estate far up within the

heaven;

From grief and groan, to a golden throne beside the King of heaven.”

HYMN.

Ar morn, at noon, at twilight dim,
Maria, thou hast heard my hymn:
In joy and woe, in good and ill,
Mother of God, be with me still!
When the hours flew brightly by,
And not a cloud obscured the sky,
My soul, lest it should truant be,
Thy grace did guide to thine and thee.
Now, when storms of fate o'ercast
Darkly my present and my past,
Let my future radiant shine

With sweet hopes of thee and thine!

A VALENTINE.

FOR her this rhyme is penned whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines; they hold a treasure
Divine-a talisman, an amulet

That must be worn at heart; search well the measure,
The words, the syllables; do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may lose your labour.
And yet there is in this no Gordian knot,
Which one might not undo without a sabre,

If one could merely comprehend the plot.
Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering
Eyes scintillating soul, there lie perdus
Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing
Of poets by poets,—as the name is a poet's too.
Its letters, although naturally lying

Like the knight Pinto-Mendez Ferdinando—
Still form a synonym før truth.—Cease trying:

*

You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do.*

FRANCES SARGENT OSGOOD, the poetess,-dead, since Poe. For her opinion of him, see Griswold's Memoir.-ED.

Ꭰ

AN ENIGMA.

"SELDOM we find," says Solomon Don Dunce,

“Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet:
Through all the flimsy things we see at once,
As easily as through a Naples' bonnet-
Trash of all trash-how can a lady don it?
Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff—
Owl-downy nonsense, that the faintest puff

Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it."
And, veritably, Sol is right enough:
The general tuckermanities are arrant
Bubbles ephemeral and so transparent;

But this is now-you may depend upon it-
Stable, opaque, immortal-all by dint

Of the dear names that lie concealed within't."

In the last two poems, read the first letter of the first line in connection with the second letter of the second line, the third letter of the third line, the fourth of the fourth, and so on to the end. The name of the persons to whom addressed will thus

appear.

* See Poe's Literati, p. 242.-Ed.

TO

Nor long ago, the writer of these lines,
In the mad pride of intellectuality,

Maintained "the power of words;" denied that ever
A thought arose within the human brain

Beyond the utterance of the human tongue:
And now, as if in mockery of that boast,
Two words-two foreign, soft dissyllables,
Italian tones, made only to be murmured
By angels dreaming in the moonlit “dew,
That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill ”-
Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart
Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,
Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions

Than even the seraph harper Israfel

(Who has "the sweetest voice of all God's creatures")
Could hope to utter. And I! my spells are broken;
The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand:
With thy dear name as text, though bidden by thee,
I cannot write-I cannot speak or think—

Alas! I cannot feel; for 'tis not feeling,

This standing motionless upon the golden