Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/87

Rh God's in his heaven— All's right with the world.

Two passages must suffice. The echo of the first seems heard in a line of Tennyson's In Memoriam, One God, one law, one element.

Poe writes:

"That Nature and the God of Nature are distinct, no thinking being can long doubt. By the former we imply merely the laws of the latter. But with the very idea of God, omnipotent, omniscient, we entertain, also, the idea of the infallibility of his laws. With Him there being neither Past nor Future—with Him all being Now—do we not insult him in supposing his laws so contrived as not to provide for every possible contingency?—or, rather, what idea can we have of any possible contingency, except that it is at once a result and a manifestation of his laws? He who, divesting himself of prejudice, shall have the rare courage to think absolutely for himself, cannot fail to arrive, in the end, at the condensation of laws into Law—cannot fail of reaching the conclusion that each law of Nature is dependent at all points upon all other laws, and that all are but consequences of one primary exercise of the Divine Volition. Such is the principle of the Cosmogony which, with all necessary deference, I here venture to suggest and to maintain."

Just as Tennyson asked that Crossing the Bar be placed last in all editions of his poems, so Poe might well have asked that the close of Eureka—his swan song—be viewed as the terminus of all that he had