Poe and Whitman were both poets preoccupied with the thought of death, but, whereas Whitman forced himself to praise it, Poe was in revolt against it as the ultimate tyrant. He saw it as the one thing that made dreadful those enchanted islands, those enchanted valleys, those enchanted palaces in which, for him, so much of the beauty of the world took refuge. He could not reconcile himself to a world that was governed by mortality. There is the wistfulness of the exile from a lost Paradise running through his verse. He is essentially a man for whom the spiritual universe exists. His angels and demons may not resemble the angels and demons of the churches--may, indeed, be little more than formulæ in his dreamland. But they are at least the formulæ of a poet into whose dreams has come the rumour of immortality. He cannot believe that the City of Death, with its awful stillness, can last for ever--that city where Shrines and palaces and towers (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!) Resemble nothing that is ours. Around, by lifting winds forgot, Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie. He feels that somewhere Eldorado is to be found, as it is by the knight who sought it: And as his strength Failed him at length He met a pilgrim shadow-- “Shadow,” said he, “Where can it be-- This land of Eldorado?” “Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,” The shade replied-- “If you seek for Eldorado!” It is true that his vision, whether of life or immortality, has something of the incoherence of the landscape of his “Dreamland”: Mountains toppling evermore Into seas without a shore. If his imagination passes “out of space, out of time,” it is on the wings of trance rather than of faith. At the same time, his dreams would not have made so strong an appeal to generations of readers if they had been mere sensational fancies, and had not seemed to wander in a wider universe than we are conscious of in our everyday life. They cannot be dismissed as the visions of a drugged man. They are the questionings of a spirit. It may be that, like some of the decadents of Europe, Poe was preyed upon by a demon--that he was an outcast poet in whose sky was The cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view.