Yet there is beauty in his designs for the "Ancient Mariner," unreal as
they are, and a consecutiveness rare in a series by Dore. The Rime afforded
him a prolonged story, with many shiftings of the scene. In _The Raven_
sound and color preserve their monotone and we have no change of place or
occasion. What is the result? Dore proffers a series of variations upon the
theme as he conceived it, "the enigma of death and the hallucination of an
inconsolable soul." In some of these drawings his faults are evident;
others reveal his powerful originality, and the best qualities in which, as
a draughtsman, he stood alone. Plainly there was something in common
between the working moods of Poe and Dore. This would appear more clearly
had the latter tried his hand upon the "Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque." Both resorted often to the elf-land of fantasy and romance. In
melodramatic feats they both, through their command of the supernatural,
avoided the danger-line between the ideal and the absurd. Poe was the truer
worshipper of the Beautiful; his love for it was a consecrating passion,
and herein he parts company with his illustrator. Poet or artist, Death at
last transfigures all: within the shadow of his sable harbinger, Vedder's
symbolic crayon aptly sets them face to face, but enfolds them with the
mantle of immortal wisdom and power.
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