Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/314

 294 EDGAR ALLAN POE �type and form too restricted for the teeming visions and insistent questionings that pushed onward and up- ward for ampler spaces and keener winds. Came �One everlasting Whisper day and night repeated so: "Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the �Ranges Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. �Go!" �Poe tried to "find it" and has left to us, if not the attained treasure behind the Ranges, at least the vision and the urge that sped him on the way. �"In reading and re-reading his collected works," says Arthur Ransome, 1 "I learnt that, perfect as his best things are, he has another title to immortality. It became clear that Poe's brain was more stimulating than his art, and that the tales and poems by which he is known were but the by-products of an unconcluded search. Throughout Poe's life he sought a philosophy of beauty that should also be a philosophy of life. He did not find it, and the unconcluded nature of his search is itself sufficient to explain his present vitality. Seekers rather than finders stimulate the imagination." In The Power of Words Poe makes Agathos say : "Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge ! In forever knowing, we are forever blessed ; but to know all were the curse of a fiend" a thought in which Browning and Poe clasp hands. �Poe's mastery of English is more evident, I think, in his prose than in his poetry, and more evident in the selections that follow than in his stories. His tales of ratiocination, for example, his masterpieces of ���1 See his Edgar Allan Poe : A Critical Study (London, 1910), p. IX, a book of rare insight and knowledge. ��� �