Whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster
but all the while pure in heart and undefiled by the deadly pollution of immorality and vice.
And so, too, on the other hand, if it be indeed true that the life of this man of transcendent powers was disfigured by deplorable lapses from the path of honor and virtue, which justice requires us to censure and condemn, may we not in our own hours of weakness and failure—of pitiable yieldings to temptation—of gloom and despondency be stimulated to renewed and continuous struggle out of darkness into light by the knowledge that he, even in the immensity of his vastly superior gifts, was unable to stand where we fell?
And in the study of his shortcomings may we not find for ourselves hope and encouragement in our strivings after the kingdom of righteousness and peace.
We should not, then, as some have done, dissociate Edgar Allan Poe, the poet, from Edgar Allan Poe, the man, and whilst extolling the one with the highest encomiums turn from the other with aversion or reproach.
Rather should we study the poet and the man together and upon the gratifying results of this study rest his right to stand upon the pinnacle of glory where for all time the verdict of the civilized world has placed him.
Knowledge, we are told, is like the mystic ladder in the patriarch s dream. Its base rests upon the primeval earth, its crest is lost in the shadowy splendor of the empyrean, while the great authors, who for traditionary ages have held the chain of science and philosophy, of
