Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/344

 3 2 4 EDGAR ALLAN POE �fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. He enwrapped himself in generalities. Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground ; and in the face of analogy and of God in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly per- vading all things in Earth and Heaven wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made. Yet this evil sprang necessarily from the leading evil, Knowledge. Man could not both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the rav- ages of some loathsome disease. And methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the far-fetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools. 6 For, in ���6 "It will be hard to discover a better [method of educa- tion] than that which the experience of so many ages has al- ready discovered ; and this may be summed up as consisting in gymnastics for the body, and music for the soul." Repub. lib. 2. "For this reason is a musical education most essential ; since it causes Rhythm and Harmony to penetrate most inti- mately into the soul, taking the strongest hold upon it, filling �it with beauiy and making the man beautiful-minded He �will praise and admire the beautiful; will receive it with joy into his soul, will feed upon it, and assimilate has own condi- tion with it." Ibid. lib. 3. Music (nouoixri) had, how- ever, among the Athenians, a far more comprehensive signi- fication than with us. It included not only the harmonies of time and of tune, but the poetic diction, sentiment, and crea- tion, each in its widest sense. The study of music was with them, in fact, the general cultivation of the taste of that which recognizes the beautiful in contra-distinction from reason, which deals only with the true. (Foe's Note.) ��� �