Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/31

Rh immemorial year”—that he wrote the strange threnody of “Ulalume.” This poem, perhaps the most original and weirdly suggestive of all his poems, resembles at first sight some of Turner’s landscapes, being apparently “without form and void, and having darkness on the face of it.” It is, nevertheless, in its basis, although not in the precise correspondence of time, simply historical. Such was the poet’s lonely midnight walk—such, amid the desolate memories and sceneries of the hour, was the new-born hope enkindled within his heart at sight of the morning star— “Astarte’s bediamonded crescent”—

coming up as the beautiful harbinger of love and happiness yet awaiting him in the untried future, and such the sudden transition of feeling, the boding dread that supervened on discovering that which had at first been unnoted, that it shone, as if in mockery or in warning, directly over the sepulchre of the lost “Ulalume.” A writer in the London Critic, after quoting 3*