Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/66

 compressing, as one says into their brief space, &quot;all the rich and high magnificence of dead centuries.&quot; The poem, The Sleeper, a picture &quot;drenched with the mystery, the ethereal beauty of a summer night; &quot; the poem Lenore, of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson once said: &quot;Never in American literature was such a fountain of melody flung into the air as when Lenore first appeared.&quot; You remember it,—full of feeling, of scorn, of hot indignation, of exultant defiance, of the triumph of deathless love bursting forth &quot;like martial trumpets.&quot; And then, his genius in the poem of The Raven, mayhap not his greatest poem, but surely his most famous, and certainly symbolic of his own mysterious life. A stroke of genius created that poem. Its royal borrowings were minted into new gold. It was fused in the alembic of his own soul. It cried out from his own heart and life. It is the fervor and passion of his own weird and majestic melancholy. It is the superb portrayal of tragic mystery, of shadowed beauty, of awful sorrow. It is a marvelous mingling of fire and music, of passion and despair. It is a work of genius, absolutely unforgetable by the world. It stands secure in its magic spell among the most remarkable poems of the ages. It has gone into many languages and become a part of the priceless heritage for all time. &quot;It is,&quot; as one says, &quot;the final threnody in memory of his lost Lenore, once the queenliest dead, but now elected to live immortally young in his somber palaces of song. The Raven is a requiem of imperial affection, a poem that takes rank with the unworded and unearthly harmonies of The Dead March in Saul.&quot;

No one s life and work were ever so intimately conjoined