Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/65

 mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal from afar, or floated to us some letter in a bottle. But what know they more than we?” In another of his essays he says, “I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which now house together in this mortal frame shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, but this one thing I know, that the law which clothes us with humanity remains new. We are immortal with the immortality of this law.”

These expressions indicate the pervading scepticism of the time. Coming, as they do, from a man who had been educated as a clergyman—a man for whose large culture and liberal faith in humanity the pulpits of the existing church seemed to offer no sufficient platform—they have an emphasis which no added word could heighten.

The negation of Carlyle, and the boundless affirmation of Emerson, served but to stimulate without satisfying the intellect. The liberal ethics of Fourier, with his