His early verses are remarkably exempt from the influences which we might expect to find impressed on them. He imitated, as every man of genuine originality imitates while he learns his trade, but his models were not, as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley; they were Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and Scott, Poe found nothing to transfer to his own nature, and the early imitations, therefore, left no trace on him. Brief as is the volume of his poems, half of it might be discarded without much regret. Scattered among his Byron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces which reveal to us that, while he was still almost a child, the true direction of his genius was occasionally revealed to him. The lyric "To Helen," which is said to have been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in the peculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to characterise his mature poems:-- "On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome." This was not published, however, until the author was two-and-twenty, and it may have been touched up. Here is a fragment of a suppressed poem, "Visit of the Dead," which Poe certainly printed in his eighteenth year:-- "The breeze, the breath of God, is still, And the mist upon the hill, Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken, Is a symbol and a token; How it hangs upon the trees, A mystery of mysteries!" This is not so perfect, but it is even more than "To Helen" symptomatic of Poe's peculiar relation to the poetic faculty as fostering a state of indefinite and indeed indefinable delight. And from these faint breathings how direct is the advance to such incomparable specimens of symbolic fancy as "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," and finally "Ulalume"! The determination to celebrate, in a minor key, indefinite and melancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than which none more dangerous can be placed in the path of a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, and he was protected, and permanent value was secured for his poetry, by the possession of one or two signal gifts to which attention must now be paid. He cultivated the indefinite, but, happily for us, in language so definite and pure that when he succeeds it is with a cool fulness, an absence of all fretting and hissing sound, such as can rarely be paralleled in English literature. The finest things in Milton's 1645 volume, Wordsworth at his very best, Tennyson occasionally, Collins in some of his shorter odes, have reached that perfection of syllabic sweetness, that clear sound of a wave breaking on the twilight sands, which Poe contrives to render, without an effort, again and again:--