Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/67

 apart, as Elizabeth Browning has so finely sculptured him,

“In his white ideal All statue-blind,”

while Keats lies sleeping, like his own “Endymion,” lost in dreams of the “dead Past.” Then, sadder, and lonelier, and more unbelieving than any of these, Edgar Poe came to sound the very depths of the abyss. The unrest and faithlessness of the age culminated in him. Nothing so solitary, nothing so hopeless, nothing so desolate as his spirit in its darker moods has been instanced in the literary history of the nineteenth century.

It has been said that his theory, as expressed in “Eureka,” of the universal diffusion of Deity in and through all things, is identical with the Brahminical faith as expressed in the Bagvat Gita. But those who will patiently follow the vast reaches of his thought in this sublime poem of the “Universe” will find that he 6*