Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/315

Rh the B type, show chiefly the logical side of the man and illustrate a zest and acumen in intellectual processes that have rarely formed any part of the dowry of poetic genius. The style, moreover, is sculptural. In his stories of the A type, the style is richer, being more plastic and more pictorial. But in these frontier sketches there is a blend of the sculptural and plastic and pictorial not equaled because not called for in the more purely narrative prose. There is the residuum of intellectual activity but the activity itself is kept in the background. We are distantly encompassed rather than immediately neighbored by it. Imagination takes the lead, and the language assumes a gravity, a somber beauty, a hymnic cadence, an utter identification with mood and thought that one finds heralded only in the purple patches of a Bacon, a Milton, a Jeremy Taylor, or a Sir Thomas Browne. If style be, as Lowell defines it, "the establishment of a perfect mutual understanding between the worker and his material," Poe found it at last in these soaring meditations that compass not only life and death, not only the natural and the supernatural, but also the dizzy arches that span the spaces between.

Let the main effort be as before to find the pivotal thought in each selection, and then to recognize and enjoy the art by which the central thought is illuminated rather than expounded. Separate passages will better repay study here than in the stories. But if a passage is taken out of its setting for any purpose, let it be put back and re-appraised as a part of a larger