THE DREAKY AND DESOLATE. 101 



Eenan, if it be really poetical, is highly enjoyed by a class 

 of readers who are inclined to look on all subjects through 

 the colored medium of passion. The poems of Ossian are 

 remarkable for this quality of style. They are tinged with 

 a deep pathos, without relating any incident that acts 

 powerfully upon our sympathy. They are especially dis- 

 tinguished by their power of awakening in the mind the 

 poetic sentiment of desolation. When the bard speaks 

 of the meteors of night that set on the hill before the 

 wanderer, of the faint roaring of distant torrents, of in- 

 constant blasts rushing through the aged oaks, and of the 

 half-enlightened moon that sinks dim and red behind the 

 hill, the beauty of his description depends on its power 

 of exciting those ineffable emotions that flow from sweet, 

 solemn, and melancholy music. 



It is from this sentiment of the dreary and desolate 

 that certain peculiar words and images, which have been 

 mostly confined to poetry, derive their forcible expression. 

 Edgar Poe used these forms of speech with singular fe- 

 licity ; and the charm of his poems flows chiefly from his 

 mystic and beautiful euphemisms. The imagery of his 

 poem entitled " Ulalume '' produces much of the sensation 

 with which we contemplate a weird or desolate scene in 

 nature. His relation, in the poem, of his wandering with 

 Psyche in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, is full of 

 a certain dreary sentiment of pathos, made still more 

 poetical by its obscurity, like a rude landscape involved 

 in luminous mist. When the skies were ashen and sober, 

 on a gloomy autumnal night, in the misty region down by 

 the dank tarn of Auber, he held a sacred interview with 

 Psyche; and their discourse, without conveying to the 

 mind any clear and intelligible thought, excites very defi- 

 nite sensations of mingled beauty and solemnity. There 

 are intellectual emotions that want the distinctness of 

 thought, and which cannot be so well described by words 



