"By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon,[6] nam'd Night, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule, From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime. Out of space, out of time." The present moment is one in which the reaction against plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in the younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is done purposely, and in accordance with mysterious harmonic laws entirely beyond the comprehension of ordinary ears, makes the matter worse. There is no heresiarch so dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating life, and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, that the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage for cacophony. He holds something of the same place in relation to Swinburne and Poe, that Donne did to Spenser three hundred years ago. In this condition of things it may seem useless to found any claim for Poe on the ground of the exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We may hope, however, some day to regain the use of our ears, and to discover once more that music and metre are utterly distinct arts. When that re-discovery has been made, Poe will resume his position as one of the most uniformly melodious of all those who have used the English language. Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection of his prosody have occasionally objected that in the most popular examples of it, "The Raven" and "The Bells," he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be objected, with equal force, that Victor Hugo in "Les Djinns" and even Tennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" made use of "tricks." On the other hand, if the charge be deserved, it seems odd that in the course of nearly seventy years no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat the wonderful experiment. In each poem there are what must be judged definite errors against taste in detail--Poe's taste was never very sure--but the skill of the long voluptuous lamentation, broken at equal intervals by the croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation, as if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of the bells, is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in keeping with the personal genius of the writer, that it is surely affectation to deny its value.