Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/35

 ground, partly covered with pines and cedars, commanding a fine view of the surrounding country and of the picturesque college of St. John’s, which had at that time in its neighbourhood an avenue of venerable old trees. This rocky ledge was also one of the poet’s favourite resorts. Here through long summer days and through solitary, star-lit nights he loved to sit, dreaming his gorgeous waking dreams, or pondering the deep problems of “The Universe”—that grand “prose-poem” to which he devoted the last and maturest energies of his wonderful intellect. The abstracted enthusiasm with which he pursued his great quest into the cosmogony of the universe is an earnest of the passionate intellectual sincerity which we shall presently take occasion to illustrate.

Wanting in that supreme central force or faculty of the mind, whose function is a God-conscious and God-adoring faith, Edgar Poe sought earnestly and conscientiously for such solution of the great problems of thought as were alone attainable to an intellect hurled