eternal pain."

The rhythmical structure of _The Raven_ was sure to make an impression.
Rhyme, alliteration, the burden, the stanzaic form, were devised with
singular adroitness. Doubtless the poet was struck with the aptness of Miss
Barrett's musical trochaics, in "eights," and especially by the arrangement
adopted near the close of "Lady Geraldine":

"'Eyes,' he said, 'now throbbing through me! Are ye eyes that did undo me?
Shining eyes, like antique jewels set in Parian statue-stone!
Underneath that calm white forehead, are ye ever burning torrid
O'er the desolate sand-desert of my heart and life undone?'"

His artistic introduction of a third rhyme in both the second and fourth
lines, and the addition of a fifth line and a final refrain, made the
stanza of _The Raven_. The persistent alliteration seems to come without
effort, and often the rhymes within lines are seductive; while the refrain
or burden dominates the whole work. Here also he had profited by Miss
Barrett's study of ballads and romaunts in her own and other tongues. A
"refrain" is the lure wherewith a poet or a musician holds the wandering
ear,--the recurrent longing of Nature for the initial strain. I have always
admired the beautiful refrains of the English songstress,--"The
Nightingales, the Nightingales," "Margret, Margret," "My Heart and I,"
"Toll slowly," "The River floweth on," "Pan, Pan is dead," etc. She also
employed what I term the Repetend, in the use of which Poe has excelled all
poets since Coleridge thus revived it:

"O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware."

Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic of the repetend. He
relied upon it to the uttermost in a few later poems,--"Lenore," "Annabel
Lee," "Ulalume," and "For Annie." It gained a wild and melancholy music, I
have thought, from the "sweet influences," of the Afric burdens and
repetends that were sung to him in childhood, attuning with their native
melody the voice of our Southern poet.

"The Philosophy of Composition," his analysis of _The Raven_, is a
technical dissection of its method and structure. Neither his avowal of
cold-blooded artifice, nor his subsequent avowal to friends that an
exposure of this artifice was only another of his intellectual hoaxes, need
be wholl