to lead you, and for one night only can you
share his dream. A tract of neither Earth nor Heaven: "No-man's-land," out
of Space, out of Time. Here are the perturbed ones, through whose eyes,
like those of the Cenci, the soul finds windows though the mind is dazed;
here spirits, groping for the path which leads to Eternity, are halted and
delayed. It is the limbo of "planetary souls," wherein are all moonlight
uncertainties, all lost loves and illusions. Here some are fixed in trance,
the only respite attainable; others

"move fantastically
To a discordant melody:"

while everywhere are

"Sheeted Memories of the Past--
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by."

Such is the land, and for one night we enter it,--a night of astral phases
and recurrent chimes. Its monodies are twelve poems, whose music strives to
change yet ever is the same. One by one they sound, like the chiming of the
brazen and ebony clock, in "The Masque of the Red Death," which made the
waltzers pause with "disconcert and tremulousness and meditation," as often
as the hour came round.

Of all these mystical cadences, the plaint of _The Raven_, vibrating
through the portal, chiefly has impressed the outer world. What things go
to the making of a poem,--and how true in this, as in most else, that race
which named its bards "the makers"? A work is called out of the void. Where
there was nothing, it remains,--a new creation, part of the treasure of
mankind. And a few exceptional lyrics, more than others that are equally
creative, compel us to think anew how bravely the poet's pen turns things
unknown

"to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation, and a name."

Each seems without a prototype, yet all fascinate us with elements wrested
from the shadow of the Supernatural. Now the highest imagination is
concerned about the soul of things; it may or may not inspire the Fantasy
that peoples with images the interlunar vague. Still, one of these lyrics,
in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as the
sublimer works of a supernatural cast,--Marlowe's "Faustus," the "Faust" of
Goethe, "Manfred," or even those ethereal masterpieces, "The Tempest" and
"A Midsummer Night's Dream." More than one, while otherwise unique, has
some burden or refrain which haunts the memory,--once heard, never
forgotten, like the tone of a rarely used but distinctive organ-stop.