On the deck was a slender,
slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the
terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and
the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar
Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems--themselves all lurid
dreams.'"
Much more may be said, but I most desired to exploit the idea put at
the beginning. By its popular poets the calibres of an age, the weak
spots of its embankments, its sub-currents, (often more significant
than the biggest surface ones,) are unerringly indicated. The lush and
the weird that have taken such extraordinary possession of Nineteenth
century verse-lovers--what mean they? The inevitable tendency of
poetic culture to morbidity, abnormal beauty--the sickliness of all
technical thought or refinement in itself--the abnegation of the
perennial and democratic concretes at first hand, the body, the earth
and sea, sex and the like--and the substitution of something for
them at second or third hand--what bearings have they on current
pathological study?
BEETHOVEN'S SEPTETTE
_Feb. 11, '80_.--At a good concert to-night in the foyer of the opera
house, Philadelphia--the band a small but first-rate one. Never did
music more sink into and soothe and fill me--never so prove its
soul-rousing power, its impossibility of statement. Especially in the
rendering of one of Beethoven's master septettes by the well-chosen
and perfectly-combined instruments (violins, viola, clarionet, horn,
'cello and contrabass,) was I carried away, seeing, absorbing many
wonders.
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