ilosophy of life,"
let the Conqueror Worm make answer:

"Lo! Tis a Gala-Night
Within the lonesome latter years--"

Is not that an arresting commencement? The word "Gala-Night"--has
it not the very malice of the truth of things?

Like Heine, it gave this poet pleasure not only to love the Dead, but
to love feeling himself dead. That strange poem about "Annie." with
its sickeningly sentimental conclusion, where the poet lies prostrate,
drugged with all the drowsy syrops in the world, and celebrates his
euthanasia, has a quality of its own. It is the "inverse" of life's
"Danse Macabre." It is the way we poor dancers long to sleep. "For
to sleep you must slumber in just such a bed!" The old madness is
over now; the old thirst quenched. It was quenched in a water that
"does not flow so far underground." And luxuriously, peacefully, we
can rest at last, with the odour of "puritan pansies" about us, and
somewhere, not far off, rosemary and rue!

Edgar Allen Poe's philosophy of Life? It may be summed up in the
lines from that little poem, where he leaves her side who has, for a
moment, turned his heart from the Tomb. The reader will remember
the way it begins: "Take this kiss upon thy brow." And the
conclusion is the confusion of the whole matter:

"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."

Strangely--in forlorn silence--passes before us, as we close his pages,
that procession of "dead, cold Maids." Ligeia follows Ulalume; and
Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the
moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of
eternity. I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion, in the
reader, to know the shudder of the loss, more dear than life, of such
as these! The more normal memory of man will still continue
repeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem:

"O daughters of dreams and of stories,
That Life is not wearied of yet--
Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Felise, and Yolande and Julette!"

Yes, Life and the Life-Lovers are enamoured still of these exquisite
witches, these philtre-bearers, these Sirens, these children of Circe.
But a few among us--those who understand the poetry of Edgar
Allen--turn away from them, to that rarer, colder, more virginal
Figure; to Her who has been born and has died, so many times; to
Her who was Ligeia and Ulalume and Helen and Lenore--for are not
all these One?--to Her we