Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/70

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Edgar Poe and his Critics.

individual identity, ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is neither more nor less than that of the absorption by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.”

This proud self-assertion betrays a mysterious isolation from the “Heart Divine” which fills us with sadness and awe.

We confess to a half faith in the old superstition of the significance of anagrams when we find, in the transposed letters of Edgar Poe’s name, the words a God-peer; words which, taken in connexion with his daring speculations, seem to have in them a mocking and malign import “which is not man’s nor angel’s.”

Yet, while the author of Eureka, like Lucretius,

———“dropped his plummet down the broad,
Deep Universe and found no God,”

his works are, as if unconsciously, filled with an overwhelming sense of the power and majesty of Deity;