Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/56

 ''laughed. And I could not laugh with the Demon, and he cursed me because I could not laugh.'' And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out and sat at the feet of the Demon and looked him steadily in the face.”

These solitary churchyard vigils, with all their associated memories, present a key to much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet’s afterlife. Questions which no human tongue could answer, no human knowledge satisfy or silence, then found an utterance in the vast and desolate chambers of his imagination, and their mournful echoes are heard again and again in the magic cadences of his verse. In the "Colloquy of Monos and Una" he has imagined all the phases of sentient life in the grave, and in the "Bridal Ballad" are stanzas which, as read by the author, were full of a wild, sad pathos not easily forgotten. We will instance only two of the stanzas although their rhythmical effect is injured by their separation from those which precede and accompany them.