The imagination of this writer rarely expresses itself in pronounced forms, but rather in a sweep of images, thronging and distant like a procession of moonlight clouds on the horizon, but like them characteristic and harmonious one with another, according to their office.
The descriptive power is greatest when it takes a shape not unlike an incantation, as in the first part of the Sleeper, where
"I stand beneath the mystic moon;
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out a golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley."
Why universal?—"resolve me that, Master Moth."
And farther on, "the lily lolls upon the wave."
This word lolls, often made use of in these poems, presents a vulgar image to our thought; we know not how it is to that of others.
The lines which follow, about the open window, are highly poetical. So is the Bridal Ballad in its power of suggesting a whole tribe and train of thoughts and pictures, by few and simple touches.
The poems written in youth, written, indeed, we understand, in childhood, before the author was ten years old, are a great psychological curiosity. Is it the delirium of a prematurely excited brain that causes such a rapture of words? What is to be gathered from seeing the future so fully anticipated in the germ? The passions are not unfrequently felt in their full shock, if not in their intensity, at eight or nine years old, but here they are reflected upon:—
| "Sweet was their death—with them to die was rife |
| With the last ecstasy of satiate life." |
The scenes from Politian are done with clear, sharp strokes; the power is rather metaphysical than dramatic. We must repeat what we have heretofore said, that we could wish to see Mr. Poe engaged in a metaphysical romance. He needs a sustained flight and far range to show what his powers really are. Let us have from him the analysis of the Passions, with their appropriate Fates; let us have his speculations clarified; let him intersperse dialogue or poem, as the occasion prompts, and give us something really good and strong, firmly wrought, and fairly blazoned.