Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/340

 320 EDGAR ALLAN POE �slumbers) and at each issuing into the light, there was more sorrow about her person, while it grew feebler, and far fainter, and more indistinct ; and at each pas- sage into the gloom, there fell from her a darker shade, which became whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length, when the sun had utterly departed, the Fay now the mere ghost of her former self, went disconso- lately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood, and that she issued thence at all I cannot say, for darkness fell over all things, and I beheld her magical figure no more. �THE COLLOQUY OF MONOS AND UNA (1841) MeXXovTa taOta. �These things are in the future. �SOPHOCLES, Antig. [1334] �[This is a companion piece to The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion. Monos died first but Una soon followed him. A century has passed and they are to- gether again. Monos has just said : "That man, as a race, should not become extinct, I saw that he must be 'born again.' " On the meaning of the two words the colloquy begins. Monos's last speech, telling what it means to die, that is, to be born again, is an earlier prose sketch of For Annie. See page 232. Of course the colloquy is more philosophic than the lyric, there being no place in verse for so subtle a thought as the birth of a sixth sense from the chaos of our mundane five. Note the Ruskinian flavor in : "Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease."] ��� �