Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/333

 THE ISLAND OF THE FAY (1841)

NuUus enim locus sine genio est. Servius.

[In his Sonnet—To Science (1829), Poe had asked

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

But here is a dream beneath the tamarind tree and a vision of a Naiad on her flood, in spite of science. Every passing of a Fay, every incursion of science into the domain of nature-worship, every victory won by knowledge over beauty and the shaping imagination is a diminution of the light of life and an enlargement of the encompassing shadow. "Is it dream or reality?" asks Lauvriere. It is both. The second paragraph shows its author's nature-piety at its best.]

"La musique" says Marmontel, in those "Contes Moraux" which, in all our translations, we have insisted upon calling "Moral Tales" as if in mockery of their spirit "la musique est le seul des talens qui jouissent de lui-mcme; tons les autres veulent des thnoins." He here confounds the pleasure derivable from sweet sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more than any other talent, is that for music susceptible of complete enjoyment, where there is no second party to appreciate its exercise. And it is only in common with other talents that it produces effects which may be fully enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the raconteur has either failed to entertain