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consider the distinctiveness of that power. And to the uncultivated talent, or to the unimaginative apprehension, this deprivation of its most delicate nare will be, not unfrequently, a recommendation. A determinations of expression sought—and often by composers who should know better—is sought as a beauty rather than rejected as a blemish."
"Ulalume" is a poem of elementary feelings heightened by contrast, but the treatment of these feelings is far from Wordsworthian. Wordsrth would have these feelings speak some real. Poe considers them per se. Their sole her is taste which "contents herself in dising the charms, waging war upon Vice solemn the ground of her deformity, her disprovision, her animosity to the fitting, to the appriate, to the harmonious—in a word Beau' (Poetic Principle.)
Poe's attitude towards elementary feeling can be explained in part after we read his creed which he has embodied in "Eureka." He tells that the "Heart Divine" and our own are identical. "Let not the merely seeming irreverence of this idea frighten our souls from that cool exercise of consciousness—from that deep tranquility of self-inspection—through which alone we can hope to attain the presence of this the most sublime of truths, and look it leisurely in the face.
The phenomena on which our conclusions must at this point depend, are merely the spiritual shadows, but none the less thoroughly substantial.
We walk about, amid the destinies of our world-existence, encompassed by dim and ever present Memories of a Destiny more vast—very distant in the by-gone time, and infinitely awful.
We live out a youth peculiarly haunted by such dreams; yet never mistaking them for dreams. As Memories we know them. During our youth the distinction is too clear to deceive us even for a moment
So long as this youth endures, the feeling that we exist is the most natural of all feelings. We understand it thoroughly. That there was a period at which we did not exist-or, that it might
so have happened that we never had existed at all—are the considerations, indeed, which during this youth, we find difficulty in understanding. Why should we not exist, is, up to the epoch of our Manhood, of all the queries the most unanswerable. Existence—self existence existence for all time to all Eternity—seems, up to the epoch of Manhood, a normal and unquestionable condition—seems because it is.
But now comes a period at which a conventional World-Reason awakens us from the truth of our dream. Doubt, Surprise, and Incomprehensibility arrive at the same moment. They say "You live, and the time was when you lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than your own; and it is only through this Intelligence you live at all." These things we struggle to comprehend and cannot, cannot because these things being untrue, are thus, of necessity, incomprehensible.
No thinking being lives who at some luminous point in his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding or believing that anything exists greater than his own soul." (Eureka.)
There are some lines in Wordsworth's "Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood," which resemble Poe's belief that the soul knows its destiny more clearly in childhood than in manhood.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star Hath had elsewhere its setting. And somethin from it
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness.
And not in utter nakedness.
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon't growing Boy:
Upon the growing Boy;
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows. He sees it in his joy;
he Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is nature's priest And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended:
At length the Man perceives it die away. And fade into the light of common day.
The point of distinction in two philosophic moods is this: with Wordsworth our spirits come from God, with Poe our spirits are God. Keeping this distinction in mind we have a key to the characteristic poems of the two poets.
SYDNEY PRENTICE.