Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/75

Rh. We need not discuss them here. They have been already too elaborately and painfully illustrated elsewhere to need further comment. How fearfully he expiated them only those who best knew and loved him can ever know. We are told that ideas of right and wrong are wholly ignored by him—that “no recognitions of conscience or remorse are to be found on his pages.” If not there where, then, shall we look for them? In William Wilson, in “The Man of the Crowd,” and in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the retributions of conscience are portrayed with a terrible fidelity. In yet another of his stories, which we will not name, the fearful fatality of crime—the dreadful fascination consequent on the indulgence of a perverse will is portrayed with a relentless and awful reality. May none ever read it who do not need the fearful lesson which it brands on the memory in characters of fire! In the relation of this remarkable story we recognise the power of a genius like that which sustains us in traversing the lowest depths of Dante’s “Inferno.” The rapid descent 7