Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/66

 elaborate social economies and systems of petrified harmony, were leading his disciples through forlorn enterprises to hopeless failures. A “divine dissatisfaction” was everywhere apparent. De Quincey saw something fearful and portentous in the vast accessions to man’s physical resources that marked the time, unaccompanied by any improvement in psychal and spiritual knowledge. Goethe had made his great dramatic poem an expression of the soul’s craving for a knowledge of spiritual existence— O giebt es geister in der luft Die zwischen Erd’ und Himmel weben, So steiget nieder aus den golden duft, Und fuhrt mich weg zu neuem bunten leben.”

Wordsworth, in his finest imaginative poem, “Laodamia,” represents and half reproves this longing. Byron iterates it with a proud and passionate vehemence in “Manfred.” Shelley’s sad heart of unbelief, finding refuge in a despair too deep for aspiration, stands