What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats

Bells; and this Poe also expanded into a stanza. He next copied out the complete poem, and headed it, ' By Mrs. M. L. Shew,' remarking that it was her poem, as she had suggested and composed so much of it. (INGRAM, Life of Poe.)

Such was the beginning of the poem; its development is described by the editor of Sartain's Union Magazine, a month after it was first published: "This poem came into our possession about a year since. It then consisted of eighteen lines! They were as follows:

About six months after this we received the poem enlarged and altered nearly to its present size and form; and about three months since, the author sent another alteration and enlargement, in which condition the poem was left at the time of his death.'

Professor Woodberry suggests that Poe probably had the idea of his poem in mind for some time before Mrs. Shew induced him to begin writing it, and remarks on 'his frequent reference to the magical sound of bells throughout his literary life.' (Life of Poe, pp. 302-304.) He also quotes a striking parallel passage from Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme.

III

Hear the loud alarum bells

Brazen bells!

What a tale of terror, now their turbulency

tells!

In the startled ear of night

How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,

They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,

40

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,

In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,

Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,

And a resolute endeavor
Now now to sit, or never,

By the side of the pale-faced moon. 50
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!

What a tale their terror tells

2 See Harrison's Life of Poe, pp. 301, 302; and chapters xi and xii of the Letters, especially pp. 342344, the letter of March 23, 1849, quoted also in Ingram's Life of Poe. In this letter was enclosed the poem, of which Poe says: 'I think the lines "For Annie" much the best I have ever written.'

The last two lines of the first stanza were suggested by Longfellow as an inscription for the monument tardily erected over Poe's grave in 1875.

GOOD-BYE1

GOOD-BYE, proud world! I'm going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river-ark on the ocean brine,

Long I've been tossed like the driven foam;
But now,
proud world! I'm going home.

Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face;
To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
To upstart Wealth's averted eye;
To supple Office, low and high;

To crowded halls, to court and street;
To frozen hearts and hasting feet;
To those who go, and those who come;
Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home.

I am going to my own hearth-stone,
Bosomed in yon green hills alone,
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green, the livelong day,
Echo the blackbird's roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

10

20