Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/230

 210 EDGAR ALLAN POE �improvements. 2 The texts that follow are those that seem to have received the poet's latest authorization. �TO HELEN (1831) �["The grace and symmetry of the outline," wrote Lowell, "are such as few poets ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosia about it." Hardly a note of dis- sent breaks the chorus of praise that has greeted this crystalline lyric. Of all Poe's poems, this, I think, would receive the vote for first place among English- speaking critics, while Ulalume would receive first award among French critics. It has been said that the highest praise ever paid a woman by a litterateur was Steele's tribute to Lady Elizabeth Hastings : "To love her was a liberal education." Against this I should confidently pit Poe's second stanza with the wide vistas that open in its two concluding lines. "Nicean" is probably a vague reference to Milton's "Nyseian isle" (Paradise Lost, IV, i, 275). We know what Poe meant by "hyacinth hair" from a pas- sage in Ligeia: see page 248.] �Helen, thy beauty is to me �Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, �The weary, way-worn wanderer bore �To his own native shore. �On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, �Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. �Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche �How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand ! �Ah, Psyche, from the regions which �Are Holy-Land ! �2 The number and minuteness of these revisions were not realized until Killis Campbell tracked and recorded them in his standard edition of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1917.) ��� �