Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/57

Rh curriculum. After proving, by his own amazing powers of analysis, that "human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve," he adds:

"It may be observed, generally, that in such investigations the analytic ability is very forcibly called into action; and, for this reason, cryptographical solutions might with great propriety be introduced into academies as the means of giving tone to the most important of the powers of the mind."

The time may come, he thinks, when the student will be taught to read not by words or paragraphs but by pages:

"A deep-rooted and strictly continuous habit of reading will, with certain classes of intellect, result in an instinctive and seemingly magnetic appreciation of a thing written; and now the student reads by pages just as other men by words. Long years to come, with a careful analysis of the mental process, may even render this species of appreciation a common thing. It may be taught in the schools of our descendants of the tenth or twentieth generation."

Poe's own habit of reading page by page was that of Theodore Roosevelt. "The child," says Lawrence F. Abbott, "reads laboriously syllable by syllable or word by word; the practised adult reads line by line; Roosevelt read almost page by page and yet remembered what he read."