Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/88

68 thought or dreamed or hoped or suffered. If "Nevermore" seem at times the refrain of all of his singing, "Evermore" was the note on which he closed; if despair seem the companion of his more solitary moods, it was only that faith and hope might abide with him at the end; if death seem to loom too large and menacing in his visions, it was over and beyond its vanishing rim that he saw rise the beckoning and unclouded life:

"These creatures [animate and inanimate] are all, too, more or less conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One. Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine."

And this is the man they call detached from the life about him, unaligned with the problems of his day, uninterested in the things that interested all others, "an