I return'd home, east, Jan. 5, 1880, having travers'd, to and fro and
across, 10,000 miles and more. I soon resumed my seclusions down
in the woods, or by the creek, or gaddings about cities, and an
occasional disquisition, as will be seen following.
EDGAR POE'S SIGNIFICANCE
_Jan. 1, '80_.--In diagnosing this disease called humanity--to assume
for the nonce what seems a chief mood of the personality and writings
of my subject--I have thought that poets, somewhere or other on the
list, present the most mark'd indications. Comprehending artists in a
mass, musicians, painters, actors, and so on, and considering each and
all of them as radiations or flanges of that furious whirling wheel,
poetry, the centre and axis of the whole, where else indeed may we so
well investigate the causes, growths, tally-marks of the time--the
age's matter and malady?
By common consent there is nothing better for man or woman than a
perfect and noble life, morally without flaw, happily balanced in
activity, physically sound and pure, giving its due proportion, and no
more, to the sympathetic, the human emotional element--a life, in all
these, unhasting, unresting, untiring to the end. And yet there is
another shape of personality dearer far to the artist-sense, (which
likes the play of strongest lights and shades,) where the perfect
character, the good, the heroic, although never attain'd, is never
lost sight of, but through failures, sorrows, temporary downfalls, is
return'd to again and again, and while often violated, is passionately
adhered to as long as mind, muscles, voice, obey the power we call
volition.
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