isplay of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic
Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral
exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or
goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it
gave should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was always this
indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream--a
"ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of time"--filled
with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet
there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. The
reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of
language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or
passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an
obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_, which is the parable of a
ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most popular of all Poe's poems,
originally published in the _American Whig Review_ for February, 1845.
Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in _Ulalume_, which, to most
people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic
feeling is among the most characteristic, and, therefore, the most
fascinating, of its author's creations.

Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad _Annabel Lee_, and _To One in
Paradise_, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and
speaks a more intelligible language. But in general his poetry is not
the poetry of the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh
and blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the
shadowy borderland between death and life.

"The play is the tragedy 'Man,'
And its hero the Conqueror Worm."

The prose tale, _Ligeia_, in which these verses are inserted, is one of
the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of
the will to overcome death. In that singularly impressive poem, _The
Sleeper_, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the
same source, the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let
the soul go free from the body.

This quality explains why Poe's _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_,
1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances, to which a few of
them, like _William Wilson_, and _The Man of the Crowd_, have some
resemblance. The former of these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's
peculiar province, the allegory of the conscienc