who can tell?--the
founder of a new religion. And yet the religion he "founds" is a
religion which has been about us for more years than human history
can count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near--too
palpable--O Christ! The terror of it!--that shadowy, monstrous
weight of oppressive darkness, through which we signal to each
other from our separate Hells. _It_ sways and wavers, it gathers and
re-gathers, it thickens and deepens, it lifts and sinks, and we know
all the while that it is the Thing we ourselves have made, and the
intolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our own
thoughts, of our lusts, of our fears, of our terrible creative dreams.

Dostoievsky's books seem, as one handles them, to flow
mysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of the
Last Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full of
desolate marshes, and forlorn spaces, and hemlock-roots, and
drowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards and
unutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmost
selves, and for which we are _answerable_ and none else.

Across this Land we wander, feeling for some fingers, cold and dead
as our own, to share that terror with, and, it may be, finding none,
for as we have groped forward we have been pitiless in the darkness,
and, half-dead ourselves, have trodden the dead down, and the dead
are those who cannot forgive; for murdered "love" has no heart
wherewith it should forgive:--_Will the Christ never come?_

EDGAR ALLEN POE

One does not feel, by any means, that the last word has been uttered
upon this great artist. Has attention been called, for instance, to the
sardonic cynicism which underlies his most thrilling effects? Poe's
cynicism is itself a very fascinating pathological subject. It is an
elaborate thing, compounded of many strange elements. There is a
certain dark, wilful melancholy in it that turns with loathing from all
human comfort. There is also contempt in it, and savage derision.
There is also in it a quality of mood that I prefer to call
_Saturnian_--the mood of those born under the planet Saturn. There is
cruelty in it, too, and voluptuous cruelty, though cold, reserved, and
evasive. It is this "cynicism" of his which makes it possible for him
to introduce into his poetry--it is of his poetry that I wish to speak--a
certain colloquial salt, pungent and acrid, and with the smell of the
tomb about it. It is co