where "his interior life, spiritual as a poet, spiritual even as a
drunkard, was but one perpetual effort to escape the influence of this
antipathetical atmosphere." Clasp the sensitive hand of a troubled singer
dreeing thus his weird, and share with him the clime in which he
found,--never throughout the day, always in the night,--if not the Atlantis
whence he had wandered, at least a place of refuge from the bounds in which
by day he was immured.

To one land only he has power to lead you, and for one night only can you
share his dream. A tract of neither Earth nor Heaven: "No-man's-land," out
of Space, out of Time. Here are the perturbed ones, through whose eyes,
like those of the Cenci, the soul finds windows though the mind is dazed;
here spirits, groping for the path which leads to Eternity, are halted and
delayed. It is the limbo of "planetary souls," wherein are all moonlight
uncertainties, all lost loves and illusions. Here some are fixed in trance,
the only respite attainable; others

"move fantastically
To a discordant melody:"

while everywhere are

"Sheeted Memories of the Past--
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by."

Such is the land, and for one night we enter it,--a night of astral phases
and recurrent chimes. Its monodies are twelve poems, whose music strives to
change yet ever is the same. One by one they sound, like the chiming of the
brazen and ebony clock, in "The Masque of the Red Death," which made the