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

In her fair page; see every season brings
New change, to her, of everlasting youth;
Still the green soil with joyous living things
Swarms; the wide air is full of joyous wings;
And myriads, still, are happy in the sleep
Of ocean's azure gulfs, and where he flings
The restless surge. Eternal love doth keep
In his complacent arms the earth, the air, the deep.

The cadences, here, at the words page, swarms, and surge respectively,
cannot be surpassed. We shall find, upon examination, comparatively
few consonants in the stanza, and by their arrangement no impediment
is offered to the flow of the verse. Liquids and the most melodious
vowels abound. World, eternal, season, wide, change, full, air,
everlasting, wings, flings, complacent, surge, gulfs, myriads,
azure, ocean, sail, and joyous, are among the softest and most
sonorous sounds in the language, and the partial line after the
pause at surge, together with the stately march of the Alexandrine
which succeeds, is one of the finest imaginable of finales-

Eternal love doth keep
In his complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep.

The higher beauties of the poem are not, we think, of the highest.
It has unity, completeness,- a beginning, middle and end. The tone,
too, of calm, hopeful, and elevated reflection, is well sustained
throughout. There is an occasional quaint grace of expression, as in

Nurse of full streams, and lifter up of proud
Sky-mingling mountains that o'erlook the cloud-

or of antithetical and rhythmical force combined, as in

The shock that burled
To dust in many fragments dashed and strewn
The throne whose roots were in another world
And whose far-stretching shadow awed our own.

But we look in vain for something more worthy commendation. At the
same time the piece is especially free from errors. Once only we
meet with an unjust metonymy, where a sheet of water is said to

Cradle, in his soft embrace, a gay
Young group of grassy islands.

We find little originality of thought, and less imagination. But in
a poem essentially didactic, of course we cannot hope for the loftiest
breathings of the Muse.
To the Past is a poem of fourteen quatrains- three feet and four
alternately. In the second quatrain, the lines