Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/96

 the last mentioned. Only one selection, Poe's analysis of The Raven, is given complete.

[A new edition of Robinson Crusoe, reviewed in The Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1836. The review has an autobiographical significance. It shows also that Poe could admire whole-heartedly a work that has neither plot nor stylistic beauty. The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838) is Poe's Robinson Crusoe.]

How fondly do we recur, in memory, to those enchanted days of our boyhood when we first learned to grow serious over "Robinson Crusoe"!—when we first found the spirit of wild adventure enkindling within us; as by the dim fire light, we labored out, line by line, the marvellous import of those pages, and hung breathless and trembling with eagerness over their absorbing—over their enchaining interest! "Nothing farther," as Vapid says, "can be done in that line." Wo, henceforward, to the Defoe who shall prate to us of "undiscovered bournes." There is positively not a square inch of new ground for any future Selkirk. Neither in the Indian, in the Pacific, nor in the Atlantic, has he a shadow of hope. The Southern Ocean has been incontinently ransacked, and in the North—Scoresby, Franklin, Parry, Ross & Co. have been little better than so many salt water Paul Prys.

While Defoe would have been fairly entitled to immortality had he never written "Robinson Crusoe," yet his many other very excellent writings have nearly