Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/86

66, perhaps, appertain solely to Eternity. And the result of such effort, on the part of souls fittingly constituted, is alone what mankind have agreed to denominate Poetry."

But Eureka, published in 1848, contains more of Poe's matured personality, more of his spiritual autobiography, than any other product of his pen. For seven years at least the main conception of this prose-poem absorbed Poe as no other constructive thought had ever absorbed him before. He seemed consciously in the grip not of a marginal truth but of a central and star-ypointing truth. "What I here propound," he writes in his brief preface, "is true:—therefore it cannot die:—or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will 'rise again to the Life Everlasting.'" Virginia's death with its long but foreseen approach had thrown him starkly back upon the problem of life here and its expansion or extinction hereafter. The companionship that he needed in these tense hours of composition was now furnished by Mrs. Clemm. "When he was composing Eureka," she wrote, "we used to walk up and down the garden, his arm around me, mine around him, until I was so tired I could not walk. He would stop every few minutes and explain his ideas to me, and ask if I understood him."

Eureka is more than a demonstration that Poe's intellect and imagination were functioning at their maximum during those lonesome latter years; it reveals that, above all the doubt and darkness and decay that seem to glimmer through his poems and stories, there shone at last the clear light of an abiding conviction that