Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/91

Rh Ah little do they know That what to them seemed vice might be but woe."

The poems that Poe wrote after the death of Virginia, the addresses that he delivered to applauding audiences, and the unexceptional testimony of the men and women who knew him most intimately during the last three months in Richmond show that there was no bankruptcy of intellect, no collapse of character, no disintegration of personality. "With all his recklessness," says Stedman, warning the reader against making Poe and the unheroic hero of William Wilson one and the same, "he was neither vicious nor criminal, and he never succeeded or wished to succeed in putting down his conscience. That stayed by him to the bitter end, and perhaps the end was speedier for its companionship."

Summing up, may we not say that Poe's work will enter upon a still wider stage of influence when it is regarded not as allurement to doubt and despair but as an outcry against them? Is is not unjust to call him the poet laureate of death and decay in the sense in which we call Shelley the poet laureate of love, Wordsworth of nature, Tennyson of trust, or Browning of resolute faith? Poe did not love death; he did not celebrate the charms of doubt or of darkness or of separation. He abhorred them. The desolate lover in The Raven does not acquiesce in "Nevermore." It flouts and belies every instinct and intuition of his heart. And in every poem and story of Poe's over which blackness seems to brood, there is the unmistakable note of spiritual protest; there is the evidence of a nature so attuned to love and light, to beauty and harmony, that denial of them or separation from them