Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/30

 16 elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than of negation."

In proof of Poe himself having possessed this "merit of the highest class," it is but necessary to refer to the Raven. Not only is the whole conception and construction of the poem evidence of his inventive originality, not only are the artistic alliteration, the profusion of open vowel sounds and the melodious metre, testimony to his sense of beauty, but, by the introduction of the third rhyme into the fourth line of the stanza, and by the new, the novel, insertion of a fifth line between that fourth line and the refrain, he did really do, what, as he pointed out, no man had done for centuries, an original thing in verse!