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That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In "The Bells" and "The Raven" we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though such juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In "Ulalume" and other showpieces the wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering tinsel fragments of nonsense verse.
It is like Foe's "Ulalume." A complete and tiny tone poem, Rubinstein made much of it. In the fourth bar and for three bars there is a held note F, and I heard the Russian virtuoso, by some miraculous means, keep this tone prolonged. The tempo is abnormally slow, and the tone is not in a position where the sustaining pedal can sensibly help it.
He wrote rapidly furiously without pausing for thought or for the fastidious choice of words that was apt to make him halt frequently in the act of composition, and the words that he wrote were the wild words wild, but beautiful and moving as an echo from Israfel's own lute of the poem, "Ulalume:"
We turn the cardboard over and the lion becomes a resource of glory and terror, a symbol of cruel persecutions or deathless courage, sign of the zodiac that Poe in Ulalume calls the Lair of the Lion.
During these days of serenity a ballad suggested by thoughts of her and his life with her in the lovely Valley of the Many-Colored Grass took form in his mind. It was no dirge-like song of the "dank tarn of Auber," but a song of a fair "kingdom by the sea" and in contrast to the sombre "Ulalume" he gave to the maiden in the new poem the pleasant sounding name of "Annabel Lee."
Uncommonly fine soporifics are they; But they seem after Tennyson, Shelley, and Poe Just a trifle too Rosy for Billy Barlow Oh, dear Raggedy, oh! Ulalume and Ænone for William Barlow. Erst, they're short. A rope! Some one quick! Ah! Chopin's 'Impromptu'! Schubert's 'Serenade'! Have you ever heard these pretty decently played?
After a time you will pass on to the High Bridge, that carried the pipes of the Croton Aqueduct over the river, this at least unchanged since his day. Walk over the path there, high above the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came to Poe for that requiem of despair, the mystic Ulalume.
"The dark tarn of Auber in the misty mid region of Weir!" Mark exclaimed. "Don't you love Ulalume? I think it's about my favourite poem." "Never heard of it," Esther replied indifferently.
Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so persistently denied them.
"Do you think the knowledge that he had written a few bits of incomparable verse helped Poe to live? If he had invented a pill or a headache powder, he would have slept on down and have dined from gold dishes." "I'd rather write 'Ulalume' than dine from gold dishes." "You think that now. But in twenty years you will sigh for a feather bed " "You don't believe that."
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