Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/73

 the ecstacy—I so regard them through a conviction that this ecstacy, in itself, is of a character supernal to the human nature—is a glimpse of the spirit’s outer world.” He had that constitutional determination to reverie which, according to De Quincey, alone enables a man to dream magnificently, and which, as we have said, made his dreams realities and his life a dream. His mind was indeed a “Haunted Palace,” echoing to the footfalls of angels and demons. “No man,” he says, “has recorded, no man has dared to record, the wonders of his inner life.”

Is there, then, no significance in this “supernatural soliciting”? Is there no evidence of a wise purpose, an epochal fitness, in the appearance, at this precise era, of a mind so rarely gifted, and accessible from peculiarities of psychal and physical organization to the subtle vibrations of an ethereal medium conveying but feeble impressions to the senses of ordinary persons; a mind which, “following darkness like a dream,” wandered forever with insatiate curiosity on the confines of that