The secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it. Yield to itsspell, accept the poet's mood: this, after all, is what the sages answer when you ask them of its value.Even though the poet himself, in his other mood, tell you that his art is but sleight of hand, his foodenchanter's food, and offer to show you the trick of it,-believe him not. Wait for his prophetichour; then give yourself to his passion, his joy or pain. "We are in Love's hand to-day!" singsGautier, in Swinburne's buoyant paraphrase,-and from morn to sunset we are wafted on theviolent sea: there is but one love, one May, one flowery strand. Love is eternal, all else unreal and putaside. The vision has an end, the scene changes; but we have gained something, the memory of acharm. As many poets, so many charms. There is the charm of Evanescence, that which lends tosupreme beauty and grace an aureole of Pathos. Share with Landor his one "night of memories andof sighs" for Rose Aylmer, and you have this to the full.And now take the hand of a new-world minstrel, strayed from some proper habitat to that rude anddissonant America which, as Baudelaire saw, "was for Poe only a vast prison through which he ran,hither and thither, with the feverish agitation of a being created to breathe in a purer world," andwhere "his interior life, spiritual as a poet, spiritual even as a drunkard, was but one perpetual effortto escape the influence of this antipathetical atmosphere." Clasp the sensitive hand of a troubledsinger dreeing thus his weird, and share with him the clime in which he found,-never throughoutthe day, always in the night,-if not the Atlantis whence he had wandered, at least a place of refugefrom the bounds in which by day he was immured.
