Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/130

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

music. The "conceit," for example, which some envious rivals of Morris have so much objected to—

Her heart and morning broke together
In the storm—

this "conceit" is merely in keeping with the essential spirit of the song proper. To all reasonable persons it will be sufficient to say that the fervid, hearty, free-spoken songs of Cowley and of Donne—more especially of Cunningham, of Harrington, and of Carew—abound in precisely similar things; and that they are to be met with, plentifully, in the polished pages of Moore and of Béranger, who introduce them with thought and retain them after mature deliberation.

Morris is, very decidedly, our best writer of songs—and, in saying this, I mean to assign him a high rank as poet. For my own part, I would much rather have written the best song of a nation than its noblest epic.

fancy and imagination

[Alciphron, by Thomas Moore, reviewed in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, January, 1840. Compare the review of The Culprit Fay, pages 82-93. The subject is discussed in chapter XIII of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and in the latter half of Wordsworth's Preface of 1815. Poe further elaborates the theme in The Broadway Journal, January 18, 1845. "The fact seems to be," he says, "that Imagination, Fancy, Fantasy, and Humor have in common the elements Combination and Novelty. The Imagination is the artist of the four."]

A new poem from Moore calls to mind that critical opinion respecting him which had its origin, we be-