Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/92

72 is a veritable death-in-life. Poe fathomed darkness but climbed to the light; he became the world's spokesman for those dwelling within the shadow but his feet were already upon the upward slope. Out of it all he emerged victor, not victim.

When I remember that Poe resented the charge of pantheism as keenly as that of atheism, when I recall that he ended his career as thinker and prophet with the chant, "All is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine," the sunlight seems to fall upon "the misty mid region of Weir," even "the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir;" and Edgar Allan Poe seems no longer our great autumnal genius, heralding an early winter, but the genius of winter itself, a late winter, with spring already at its heart.