EEYIEW — TALES OE MTSTEET AND POEMS. 105 



the angels name Lenore," who constitutes the heroine of his more 

 famous " Raven" lyric But sweet and gracefully touching as are 

 some of the ideas, and musical as are the lines, the "Raven" of 

 Poe's morbid genius nutters ever towards the close, and he winds 

 up this, as well as nearly every other psean, with thoughts born of his 

 own brooding misanthrophy which could well be spared. 



LENORE. 

 Ah, broken is the golden bowl ! the spirit flown for ever ! 

 Let the bell toll ! — a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river ; 

 And Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear ? — weep now or never more ! 

 See ! on yon drear and rigid bier, low lies thy love, Lenore ! 

 Come ! let the burial rite be read — the funeral song be sung ! — 

 An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young — 

 A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young. 



" Wretches ! ye loved her for her wealth, and hated for her pride, 

 And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her — that she died ! 

 How xhall the ritual, then, be read ? — the requiem how be sung 

 By you — by yours, the evil eye — by yours, the slanderous tongue 

 That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young ? 



Peccavimus ! but rave not ihus ! and let a Sabbath song 



Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong ! 



The sweet Lenore hath " gone before," with Hope that flew beside, 



Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride — 



For her, the fair and debonnair, that now so lowly lies, 



The life upon her yellow hair, but not within her eyes — 



The life still there upon her hair — the death upon her eyes. 



" Avaunt ! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise, 



But waft the angel on her flight with a pjean of old days ! 



Let no bell toll ! lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, 



Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned earth, 



To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven — 



From hell unto a high estate far up within the heaven — 



From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven." 



The same strangely morbid bent of thought which mars the 

 beauty of the stanzas here is perhaps even more apparent in 

 his piece called " The Bells," suggested we can scarcely doubt by 

 Moore's '* Evening Bells," ringing, unconsciously perhaps, . in 

 memory's ear. But the American Poet's theme is, in its starting 

 point at least, a thoroughly native one : the mirthful, heart-enliven- 

 ing music of the sleigh-bells, which give a music to our long winter 

 that repays in part the coyness of the spring's forest-songsters, and 

 cheeringly contrasts with the melancholy pathos of our summer 

 nightingale, the "Whip-poor-will. We say nothing of certain 



