Notable among them is Buerger's "Lenore," that ghostly and resonant ballad,
the lure and foil of the translators. Few will deny that Coleridge's
wondrous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" stands at their very head. "Le
Juif-Errant" would have claims, had Beranger been a greater poet; and, but
for their remoteness from popular sympathy, "The Lady of Shalott" and "The
Blessed Damozel" might be added to the list. It was given to Edgar Allan
Poe to produce two lyrics, "The Bells" and _The Raven_, each of which,
although perhaps of less beauty than those of Tennyson and Rossetti, is a
unique. "Ulalume," while equally strange and imaginative, has not the
universal quality that is a portion of our test.

_The Raven_ in sheer poetical constituents falls below such pieces as "The
Haunted Palace," "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," and "Israfel." The
whole of it would be exchanged, I suspect, by readers of a fastidious cast,
for such passages as these:

"Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently--

* * *

Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

* * *

No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea--
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene."

It lacks the aerial melody of the poet whose heart-strings are a lute:

"And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli's fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings--
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings."

But _The Raven_, like "The Bells" and "Annabel Lee," commends itself to the
many and the few. I have said elsewhere that Poe's rarer productions seemed
to me "those in which there is the appearance, at least, of
spontaneity,--in which he yields to his feelings, while dying falls and
cadences most musical, most melancholy, come from him unawares." This is
still my belief; and yet, upon a fresh study of this poem, it impresses me
more than at any time since my boyhood. Close acquaintance tells in favor
of every true work of art. Induce the man, who neither knows art nor cares
for it, to examine some poem or paint