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LITERARIANA.
——
AMERICAN.
THE early editions of the poetical works of the late Edgar A. Poe not only show many curious variations of text in poems which he pretended afterwards to reprint “verbatim et liberatim,” but contain whole poems which are not to be found in the current editions of his writings. His first publication, “Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems” (Baltimore: Hatch & Dunning, 1829), a quarto pamphlet of seventy-one pages, has among the “Minor Poems” two or three with which the general reader is unacquainted. Here is one on page 65:
SPIRITS OF THE DEAD.
I.
Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone —
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy:
II.
Be silent in that solitude
Which is not loneliness — for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee — and their will
Shall then overshadow thee: be still.
III.
For the night — tho' clear — shall frown —
And the stars shall look not down,
From their high thrones in the Heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given —
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever:
IV.
Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish —
Now are visions ne'er to vanish —
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more — like dew-drop from the grass:
V.
The breeze — the breath of God — is still —
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy — shadowy — yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token —
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries! —
On page 68 may be found the following:
TO M——.
I.
O! I care not that my earthly lot
Hath — little of Earth in it —
That years of love have been forgot
In the fever of a minute —
II.
I heed not that the desolate
Are happier, sweet, than I —
But that you meddle with my fate
Who am a passer-by.
III.
It is not that my founts of bliss
Are gushing — strange! with tears —
Or that the thrill of a single kiss
Hath palsied many years —
IV.
‘Tis not that the flowers of twenty springs
Which have wither'd as they rose
Lie dead on my heart-strings
With the weight of an age of snows.
V.
Nor that the grass — O! may it thrive!
On my grave is growing or grown —
But that, while I am dead yet alive
I cannot be, lady, alone.
Poe's own copy of “Eureka,” which we possess (New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1848), is corrected throughout for a future edition, which it never reached in its author's lifetime. The last page contains, in pencil, the following summing up of its philosophy: “Note. — The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is, neither more nor less than that of the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.”
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - RT, 1866] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Literariana (R. H. Stoddard, 1866)