Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/26

 12 formed upon the basis of Pike's, though it is true, so improved and expanded by extra feet, and the addition of another long line, that they need a very careful and crucial examination ere the appearance becomes manifest. Minor, or less salient points of resemblance, such as "the melancholy strain" of the mocking bird, and the "melancholy burden" of the raven need no further comment, as the reader will be able to detect them for himself.

It is now necessary to examine the claims of another poem to having been an important factor in the inception and composition of The Raven. A few months previous to the publication of Poe's poetic masterwork he read and reviewed the newly published Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (Mrs. Browning). From amid the contents of the volumes he selected for most marked commendation Lady Geraldine's Courtship, strongly animadverting, however, upon its paucity of rhymes and deficiencies of rhythm. The constructive ability of the authoress he remarks "is either not very remarkable, or has never been properly brought into play:—in truth her genius is too impetuous for the minuter technicalities of that elaborate art so needful in the building-up of pyramids for immortality."

It has been hastily assumed that the author of the Raven drew his conception of it from Lady Geraldine's Courtship. The late Buchanan Read even informed Mr. Robert Browning that Poe had described to him the whole construction of his poem and had stated the suggestion of it lay wholly in this line of Mrs. Browning's poem—

"With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air, the purple curtain."