Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/69

 as Poe's. His poetry was himself—mysterious, weird, melancholy, passionate. His poems cannot escape from him without his very life. Every one of his great poems,—and there are only about a dozen of these,—were wrung from the great crises of his life, and are full of the same spirit-varying phases of &quot;the great enigma of death and the majestic musings of an inconsolable soul.&quot;

Poe was, as all the South is, a worshipper of the beautiful. His supreme love for the beautiful was his consecrating and his consuming passion. He loved it with a marvelous awe and a sublime devotion; his unutterable conceptions were full of gloom and glory. His only religion and his only sacrifice on earth were his unceasing fidelity to love and beauty, and his unconquerable longings for the unattainable. His mystical cadences seem to bring us into the very shadow of the supernatural. They are an enchanted treasure, more precious than silver or gold.

The French poet and critic, Baudelaire, who translated him marvelously well into the French speech, saw Poe as &quot;a new-world minstrel strayed from some proper habitat to this rude and dissonant America, which was for Poe only a vast prison through which he ran hither and thither, with the feverish agitation of a being created to breathe in another world and where his interior life, spiritual as a poet, was but one perpetual effort to escape the influence of this mundane atmosphere. Clasp the sensitive hand of this troubled singer dreeing thus his weird, and enter into the night with him and share his dreams, and lament with him the charm of evanescence, and the supreme beauty and the unattainable.&quot; So Poe lures us into his unforgetable &quot;night of memories and sighs.&quot;