The longer poem under the same title, and apparently addressed to the same sorceress, is more entirely "in his mood." Those shadowy, moon-lit "parterres," those living roses--Beardsley has planted them since in another "enchanted garden"--and those "eyes," that grow so luminously, so impossibly large, until it is almost pain to be "saved" by them--these things are in Poe's true manner; for it is not "Helen" that he has ever loved, but her body, her corpse, her ghost, her memory, her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach! And these things none can take from him. The maniacal egoism of a love of this kind--its frozen inhumanity--can be seen even in those poems which stretch yearning hands towards Heaven. In "Annabel Lee," for instance, in that sea-kingdom where the maiden lived who had no thought--who _must_ have no thought--"but to love and be loved by me"--what madness of implacable possession, in that "so all the night-tide I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea!" The same remorseless "laying on of hands" upon what God himself cannot save from us may be discerned in that exquisite little poem which begins: "Thou wast all to me, love, For which my soul did pine; A green isle in the Sea, love, A Fountain and a Shrine All wreathed with Fairy fruits and flowers; And all the flowers were mine!" That "dim-gulf" o'er which "the spirit lies, mute, motionless, aghast"--how well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those days of his which are "trances," and in those "nightly dreams" which are all he lives for, he is with her; with her still, with her always; "In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams!" The essence of "immorality" does not lie in mad Byronic passion, or in terrible Herodian lust. It lies in a certain deliberate "petrifaction" of the human soul in us; a certain glacial detachment from all interests save one; a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with our own emotion. And this emotion, for the sake of which every earthly feeling turns to ice, is our Death-hunger, our eternal craving to make _what has been_ be again, and again, forever! The essence of immorality lies not in the hot flame of natural, or even unnatural, desire. It lies in that inhuman and forbidden wish to arrest _the processes of life_--to lay a freezing hand--a dead hand--upon what we love, so that it _shall always be the same._ The really immoral thing is to isolate, from among the affections and passions and attractions of this human world, one particular lure; and then, having endowed this with the living body of "eternal death," to bend before it, like the satyr before the dead nymph in Aubrey's drawing, and murmur and mutter and shudder over it, through the eternal recurrence of all things!