Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/59

Rh which is, as emphatically, untrue. We appeal from this last assertion to Mr. Poe’s own exposition of his poetic theory. He recognises the elements of poetic emotion-the emotion of the beautiful—“in all noble thoughts, in all holy impulses, in all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing deeds” His “æsthetic religion,” which has been so strangely misapprehended was simply a recognition of the divine and inseparable harmonies of the supremely Beautiful and the supremely Good.

The author of the very able and systematic critique in the North American Review (which is, nevertheless, essentially false in all its estimates of intellectual and moral character) tells us that he “repudiated moral uses in his prose fictions as in his poetry, and that if moral or spiritual truths are found in them they must have got there accidentally, without the author’s permission or knowledge.” This is very unjust. To prove its injustice we have only once more to quote the author’s own words. “Taste,” the sense of the beautiful, “holds intimate relations with the intellect and the moral sense;