Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/40

 ring and resonance—the vibration and reverberation of the rhythm—is such that one of its admirers says, “We can never read it without pausing after every verse to let the peals of sound die away on the ‘bosom of the palpitating air,’ that we may commence the succeeding stanza in silence.” Another, who appreciates its ideal truth of conception not less than its high rhythmical art, says, “I was astonished one night in watching a conflagration, and repeating, amid the clash and clang of the alarm-bells, the third stanza of the poem, to find how marvellously the movement of the verse timed with the peals of sound, and how truly the poem reproduced the sense of danger which the sound of the bells, and the glare and mad ascension of the flames, and the pallor of the moonlight conveyed. All the poetry of a conflagration is in that stanza, both in sound and sense, and Dante himself could not have rendered it more truly.”

So many faculties were brought into play in the expression of Poe’s poetical compositions that readers in whom the critical intellect prevails over the imaginative