Here the angels and the absurd sonorous name Leonainie, and the midnight, are all very like Edgar Poe’s manner, and very like his usual sentiment is the conclusion, when
My Leonainie drifted
From me in a dream.
But whether the resemblances are beyond the reach of parody it were rash to pronounce.”
During his lifetime the inward application of spirits had a very bad effect upon Poe, and since his death spirits have done much to injure his reputation. It was bad enough for Miss Lizzie Doten and Dr. J. Garth Wilkinson to palm off their melodious twaddle as inspired by the spirit of Poe, the poems were nonsense, it is true, but nonsense written by educated persons. Whereas a work, published in New York twenty years ago, purporting to have been dictated by the spirits of deceased authors, contained a poem by the ghost of Poe which is noteworthy for the absence of any sense, and for the presence of grammatical errors which Poe, when living, would never have perpetrated.
As an authentic “spirit poem” it is curious, showing how Poets deteriorate when in Hades. The book is entitled “Strange Visitors,” dictated by Spirits through a Clairvoyant. New York, G. W. Carleton, publisher, 1869.
The Lost Soul.
Hark the bell! the funeral bell,
Calling the soul
To its goal.