Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/79

Rh Bible style that he achieves in many of his greatest prose passages. No one could have written Shadow, a Parable or Silence, a Fable unless he had so communed with the Old Testament prophets as to catch both the form and the spirit of their utterance. In dignity and elevation of thought, in faultlessness of keeping, in utter simplicity of style and structure, Poe's workmanship in these two selections alone would place him not only among the masters of English prose but among the still smaller number of those whose mastery seems not so much a homage to ancient models as an illumination from the same central sun.

Poe's interest in the discoveries that were beginning to throw new light upon many perplexing problems in the Bible was not the interest of the antiquarian. There was little of the antiquarian in his nature. It was the interest of one who feels an instinctive fellowship with all forms of progressive thought. "I read all the time," says Edison, "on astronomy, chemistry, biology, physics, music, metaphysics, mechanics, and other branches—political economy, electricity, and, in fact, all things that are making for progress in the world." Poe might have said the same. It was the forward movement, the widening horizon, the latent possibilities of a subject that interested Poe, rather than the elemental nature of the subject itself. Landscape gardening, mesmerism, cryptography, metaphysical speculation, the nebular hypothesis, the new science or pseudo-science of aeronautics, the explorations then making in the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas, Maury's additions to