Another theory, propounded by Mr. Ingram, who has, perhaps, done more than anyone to vindicate the memory of Poe from the calumnies of his _soi-disant_ biographer, Griswold, is that the inspiration of “The Raven” is to be found in a poem called “Isidore,” which was contributed by Albert Pike, the Arkansas poet, to “The New Mirror,” at a time when Poe was writing for the same journal. In this poem a bird “whose song enhances depression”—a mocking-bird to wit—also figures, while the refrain is not unlike that of “The Raven.” However, even if we are prepared to admit that “The Raven” is not so entirely the fruit of its author’s imagination as was at first supposed, this fact does not sensibly detract from the merits of a work which must always retain its place amongst the masterpieces of English verse. Poe then, as we have endeavoured to show, is very far from being a single-poem poet; but, on the other hand, he is undoubtedly the poet of a single mood—a mood which by no stretch of the imagination can be called a pleasing one in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but withal so striking and so original as to command—nay, even to compel—the reader’s attention. Poe does not sing of “emerald fields” and “ambient streams,” like Wordsworth; of wide, rolling prairies and dense forests of murmuring pines, like Longfellow; of “stainless knights” and “lily maids,” like Tennyson; nor of love both within and without the limits of the conscience, like Byron. No, his theme is a widely different one from all these. As with his prose romances so with his poetry. Just as in his romances he concerns himself in the main with subjects which most writers of fiction leave severely alone—with death in strange and awful forms; with the horrors of insanity and remorse; with men who under mesmeric influences continue to speak long after the King of Terrors has laid his icy finger upon them; with others who are prematurely buried, and who explore the secrets of the charnel-house—in a word, with what his friend honest John Kennedy called “the terrific”: so in his poetry his song is of phantom cities sinking into fathomless seas; of demon shapes flitting through enchanted palaces; of ghoul-haunted tarns; of “sheeted memories of the past”; of loved ones who have been taken from us, and of the utter hopelessness of reunion with them in “the distant Aidenn.” Sadness, as we have said elsewhere, is the dominant note of all his poetry; but sadness, as he himself tells us in his “Philosophy of Composition,” was his conception of the highest tone of Beauty, and therefore the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. Thus we understand why it is that the death of a beautiful woman—the saddest of all losses—forms the burden of so many of his finest lyrics. How different is all this from Shelley, who defines poetry as what redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man, and is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and