Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/64

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Edgar Poe and his Critics.

of the conventicle or the theatre. What a sovran grace of sincerity in his chapter on Experience. What noble ethics in his statement of spiritual laws. Yet, if we turn to the pages of Emerson and look for the evidences of his belief in the soul’s individual immortality, we shall find that the words he has uttered on the subject express, for the most part, either a purely Oriental indifference or an aimless and anxious questioning. In his lecture to the Divinity Students of Cambridge, protesting against the formalism and famine of the churches, he told them that the faith of the Puritans was dying out and none arising in its stead—that the eye of youth was not lighted by the hope of other worlds—that literature had become frivolous and science cold. In his lecture on “The Times” he says, “We drift like white sail across the wide ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea;—but from what port did we sail? Who knows? Or to what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed