I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant, eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees.... I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling and gazed down.... About the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity; an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn; a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. Pestilent and mystic is the atmosphere of Princess Maleine. The quotation is from The Fall of the House of Usher. There is much of Poe's dark tarn, of Auber, and the misty mid-region of Weir in the early Maeterlinck. The dénouement is horrible. Maleine is strangled by the Queen, who also loves Hjalmar, and to the accompaniment of a lunar eclipse, thunderbolts, a cyclone, meteors that explode, wounded swans that fall from stormy skies, this night of strange portents comes to an end after the prince avenges Maleine by stabbing the queen and killing himself. There is a dog that sniffs, scratches, and howls at the locked door of the murdered princess. Its name is Pluto. There are chanting and spectral nuns, lewd beggars, an old Shakespearian nurse, a freakish boy, and the usual scared courtiers. The scenes do not hang together at all--there is no sequence of action, only of moods; or rather the same mood persists throughout. Yet the lines bite at times, and there are great fissures of silence, pauses as deep and as sinister as murky midnight pools. These pauses are always pregnant,--like the pauses in strange pages of Schumann or those mysterious empty bars at the beginning of a Chopin tragedy in tone,--empty, forbidding vestibules to woful edifices. "There is a little kitchen maid's soul at the bottom of her green eyes;" "I am sick to die of it one of those twenty thousand nights we have to live;" "How dark? how dark? Is a forest lit up like a ball room?" "The poor never know anything;" "Will she not have a little silence in her heart?" "She is as cold as an earthworm;" "Oh! look, look at their eyes. They will leap out upon me like frogs;" "My God! My God! She is waiting now on the wharves of hell;" "How unhappy the dead look!" These and many more, with gasps and ejaculations, make up a dialogue that is at least original, though bizarre. Naturally it is all the fruit of green, immature genius. The ideas, hysterical and few as they are, begin to assume some coherence if compared with the emotional and disconnected experiments of the poems.