Wait for his prophetic hour; then give yourself to
his passion, his joy or pain. "We are in Love's hand to-day!" sings
Gautier, in Swinburne's buoyant paraphrase,--and from morn to sunset we are
wafted on the violent sea: there is but one love, one May, one flowery
strand. Love is eternal, all else unreal and put aside. The vision has an
end, the scene changes; but we have gained something, the memory of a
charm. As many poets, so many charms. There is the charm of Evanescence,
that which lends to supreme beauty and grace an aureole of Pathos. Share
with Landor his one "night of memories and of sighs" for Rose Aylmer, and
you have this to the full.
And now take the hand of a new-world minstrel, strayed from some proper
habitat to that rude and dissonant America which, as Baudelaire saw, "was
for Poe only a vast prison through which he ran, hither and thither, with
the feverish agitation of a being created to breathe in a purer world," and
where "his interior life, spiritual as a poet, spiritual even as a
drunkard, was but one perpetual effort to escape the influence of this
antipathetical atmosphere." Clasp the sensitive hand of a troubled singer
dreeing thus his weird, and share with him the clime in which he
found,--never throughout the day, always in the night,--if not the Atlantis
whence he had wandered, at least a place of refuge from the bounds in which
by day he was immured.
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