Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/65

 forth out of his early youth, a careless glory of beauty and music, in those days before he was touched with infinite sorrow and inconsolable memories; such as the poem of Annabel Lee, a miracle of melody, with a universal heart-appeal, pure music, magical in its exquisite sweetness and haunting refrains; such a poem as those wonderful and startling verses called For Annie,—"When this fever called living is over;&quot; such a poem as that weird and awful conception of The City in the Sea, &quot;The mystical kingdom of death;&quot; such a poem as The Haunted Palace, terribly splendid in its portrayal of the ruin of the palace of a soul; such a poem as Ulalume, that weird legend of temptation by ignoble passion, and the power of a holy memory to save,—"a dream of the dark tarn of Auber, and the mystic mid woodland of Wier,"—a symphony in tone color,—as primitive as "an Icelandic saga with the surge of the sea in it" or a faint weird echo of "murmuring gurgling waters in the depths of a gloomy canyon of the Sierras." Or see his genius in such a poem as The Bells, that rare piece of fantasy, ringing alternately with light and with majestic music,—its words and rhymes, its rhythm and cadences, and repetends most perfectly fitted to its themes upon which it rings the wonderful changes, like one of the majestic fugues of John Sebastian Bach. Or see his genius again in those several poems of the mystic idealization of great sorrow and bereavement. The first lines To Helen, one of the most exquisite of his poems, serenely exultant, crystalline perfect, containing those two superb lines,