"Criticism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

The bat in the shelvy rock is hid
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katydid;
And the plaint of the wailing whippoorwill
Who mourns unseen, and ceaseless sings
Ever a note of wail and wo-

Up to the vaulted firmament
His path the fire-fly courser bent,
And at every gallop on the wind
He flung a glittering spark behind.

He blessed the force of the charmed line
And he banned the water-goblins' spite,
For he saw around in the sweet moonshine,
Their little wee faces above the brine,
Grinning and laughing with all their might
At the piteous hap of the Fairy wight.

The poem "To a Friend" consists of fourteen Spenserian stanzas.
They are fine spirited verses, and probably were not supposed by their
author to be more. Stanza the fourth, although beginning nobly,
concludes with that very common exemplification of the bathos, the
illustrating natural objects of beauty or grandeur by references to
the tinsel of artificiality.

Oh! for a seat on Appalachia's brow,
That I might scan the glorious prospects round,
Wild waving woods, and rolling floods below,
Smooth level glades and fields with grain embrowned,
High heaving hills, with tufted forests crowned,
Rearing their tall tops to the heaven's blue dome,
And emerald isles, like banners green un-wound,
Floating along the take, while round them roam
Bright helms of billowy blue, and plumes of dancing foam.

In the Extracts from Leon are passages not often surpassed in
vigor of passionate thought and expression- and which induce us to
believe not only that their author would have succeeded better in
prose romance than in poetry, but that his attention would have
naturally fallen into the former direction, had the Destroyer only
spared him a little longer.
This poem contains also lines of far greater poetic power than any
to be found in the Culprit Fay. For example-

The stars have lit in heaven their lamps of gold,
The viewless dew falls lightly on the world;
The gentle air that softly sweeps the leaves
A strain of faint unearthly music weaves: