Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/74

 —“wild, weird clime, that lieth sublime Out of Space, out of Time! By each spot the most unholy, In each nook most melancholy,”

seeking to solve the problem of that phantasmal Shadow-Land, which, through a class of phenomena unprecedented in the world’s history, was about to attest itself as an actual plane of conscious and progressive life, the mode and measure of whose relations with our own are already recognised as legitimate objects of scientific research by the most candid and competent thinkers of our time? We assume that, in the abnormal manifestations of a genius so imperative and so controlling, this epochal significance is most strikingly apparent. Jean Paul says truly that “there is more poetic fitness, more method, a more intelligible purpose in the biographies which God Almighty writes than inventions of poets and novelists.”

The peculiarities of Edgar Poe’s organization and temperament doubtless exposed him to peculiar