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The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Poems and Tales
The Raven The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Poems and Tales Author:Edgar Allan Poe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TALES. A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM.1 ' The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways, nor re the models that we frame any way commensur... more »ate to the vast- nes, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, u-!n't:h have a dentil in them greater than the well of Democritus." Joseph Glanvill. We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak. 1 A Descent into the Maelstrom distinctly the most realistic and exciting of the Tales of Pseudo-Science was first published iu Graham's Magazine for May, 1841. It was the third of the aeries, having been preceded by the MS. Found in a Bottle and by Hans Pfall, Its sheer imaginative power lifts it out of the class of compositions to which it belongs, which if Poe did not originate, he nevertheless did much to popularize,and makes it literature in a very real and true sense. This success is probably due to the fact that in no other tale does Poe so thoroughly fuse his power of analysis and his power of depicting a situation. This motto, which, as is not unusual with Poe, is incorrectly jyiven, has been found by Professor Woodberry in Glanvill's Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, London, 1676. Glanvill (or Glanvil) was born in 1636 and died in 1680. He was a clergyman noted for his philosophical writings, of which the Vanity of Dogmatizing and a book on Sorcery are best known. The latter is discussed by Leoky in his great work on Rationalism ; the former furnished Matthew Arnold with the basis of his Scholar Gypsy. The Democritus referred to in the motto is of course the famous " laughing philosopher " of Abdera (born about 490 B. c.), who is better known for Iks constant ridicule of the follies of humanity than...« less