(280) A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM. The text is from the 1845 (London) edition. There are dangerous tidal currents at the point of the Norwegian coast described in the tale, but the huge whirlpool is Poe's invention. Joseph Glanville:

an English author of the seventeenth century.

(281) Nubian geographer's: in Eureka Poe refers to "the Nubian geographer, Ptolemy Hephestion," probably meaning Ptolemy, the famous Egyptian astronomer and geographer of the second century A.D.; there is no evidence that he was a Nubian. Mare Tenebrarum: "Sea of Shadows," the Atlantic, of which little was known by the ancients.

(282) a mile: in Lorimer Graham's copy of the tales, Poe changed this to "half a mile."

(283) a Norway mile: about four and a half English miles.

(287) taken aback: a sea phrase meaning that the motion of the vessel was checked by a change of wind that blew the sails back upon the masts.

(289) going large: running before the wind. ¶ counter: a part of the stern. (291) small: In Lorimer Graham's copy of the tales, Poe changed this to "large." lay more along: inclined more from the horizontal; cf. the second paragraph below, in the text.

(294) of any form whatever: "See Archimedes, 'De Incidentibus in Fluido.'— lib. 2."-Poe's note. Archimedes, of the third century B.C., was the greatest of the Greek mathematicians.

(295) THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. The text is from the 1845 (London) edition. "Son cœur . . . . résonne": "His heart is a suspended lute; so soon as one touches it, it responds." Béranger was a contemporary French poet (17801857); the lines have not been found in his works.

(299) ennuyé: "tired," "bored."

(304) Porphyrogene: "Born to the purple," i.e., of royal birth.

(305) other men: "Watson, Dr. Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the Bishop of Llandaff.-See 'Chemical Essays,' vol. v."-Poe's note. ¶ such works: most of those enumerated are known really to exist, but some are not of the nature which Poe implies-Belphegor, e.g., is a satire on marriage.

....

(306) Egipans: error for "Ægipans," the name given by Mela and Pliny to goat-like men in Africa, perhaps baboons. ¶ Vigiliae Maguntinae: "Vigils of the Dead according to the Choir of the Church of Maguntia [=Mayence]." No such book is known.

(309) "Mad Trist" of Sir Launcelot Canning: no such tale or writer is known.

(313) THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. The text is from Griswold's 1850 edition, except for a few readings from the Broadway Journal text. The tale has a certain historical background in the punishments inflicted on heretics by the Spanish Inquisition, a state institution, which in earlier centuries had gone to great extremes of cruelty; these, however, had long been abandoned at the time of the tale, which is pitched early in the nineteenth century. ¶ Impia.... patent: "Here an impious band, insatiate, nourished its prolonged madness on innocent blood. Now that the country is saved and the cave of death destroyed, where dire death was, life and health lie open." The motto is from Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature;

there was such a market, but no such inscription. ¶Jacobin Club House: the Jacobins supported Robespierre in the Reign of Terror.

(316) autos-da-fé: executions of heretics (literally, "acts of faith").

(321) Ultima Thule: the name given by the ancients to an island in the Atlantic, far to the north; it came to be used for any extreme limit.

(327) General Lasalle: a cavalry officer under Napoleon, who invaded Spain in 1808 and suppressed the Inquisition.

"

(327) THE PURloined Letter. The text is from the 1845 (London) edition. ¶ Nil . . . . nimio: "Nothing more odious to wisdom than too much acumen.' Seneca was a Roman philosopher of the first century A.D. ¶ au troisiême: "on the third" floor. the Rue Morgue Marie Rogêt: see Poe's tales, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt."

....

(334) Abernethy: a famous and somewhat eccentric British physician (17641831).

(336) Procrustean bed: Procrustes ("the Stretcher") was a legendary Greek robber, who tortured his captives by stretching them to fit his bed if they were too short for it, and cutting off portions of their limbs if they were too long. (337) recherchés:

for, hidden."

'sought out"; here in the sense of "that must be sought

(338) non distributio medii: “the undistributed middle," a term of mediaeval logic; here it means that the reasoner has failed to distribute, or divide, the middle term of his syllogism, poets, into those who are fools and those who are not. ¶'ll ya.... nombre': "I am ready to wager that every public idea, every received convention, is nonsense, for it has been agreed to by the majority." ¶ Chamfort: a French writer of the eighteenth century.

(339) 'ambitus': "going about to solicit something." ¶'religio': "conscientiousness."'homines honesti": "distinguished men." (In secondary senses,

however, all these words had the meanings that Dupin rejects.)

(340) intriguant: "intriguer."

(341) vis inertia: "force of inertia."

(344) facilis descensus Averni: "easy the descent to Hell." ¶ monstrum horrendum: "horrid monster." ¶ Un dessein . . . . Thyeste: “A design so fatal, if it is not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes." Thyestes seduced the wife of his brother, Atreus, king of Mycenae, and attempted to kill him; Atreus in revenge slew the son of Thyestes and gave the body to him to eat. ¶Crébillon's: Crébillon (1674-1762) was a French dramatist.

CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM

"In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results

of the predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded, analysis. It is this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at once reaches forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bring about certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate parts tend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to his own mind. . . For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other hand, is a spectator ab extra. He analyzes, he dissects, he watches

-with an eye serene,

The very pulse of the machine.

A monomania he paints with great power. He loves to dissect these cancers of the mind, and to trace all the subtile ramifications of its roots. In raising images of horror, also, he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by a dusky hint some terrible doubt which is the secret of all horror. . . . . His style is highly finished, graceful, and truly classical. It would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied powers."-J. R. Lowell, in Graham's Magazine, February, 1845.

....

"No one can read these tales, then close the volume, as he may with a thousand other tales, and straightway forget what manner of book he has been reading. Commonplace is the last epithet that can be applied to them. They are strangepowerful-more strange than pleasing, and powerful productions without rising to the rank of genius. . . . . There is, in the usual sense of the word, no passion in these tales, neither is there any attempt made at dramatic dialogue. The bent of Mr. Poe's mind seems rather to have been towards reasoning than sentiment. The style, too, has nothing peculiarly commendable; and when the embellishments of metaphor and illustration are attempted, they are awkward, strained, infelicitous. But the tales rivet the attention. There is a marvellous skill in putting together the close array of facts and of details which make up the narrative, or the picture; for the effect of his description, as of his story, depends never upon any bold display of the imagination, but on the agglomeration of incidents, enumerated in the most veracious manner."-Blackwood's Magazine, November, 1847.

....

"He has De Foe's peculiar talent for filling up his pictures with minute lifelike touches-for giving an air of remarkable naturalness and truth to whatever he paints. . . . . In A Descent into the Maelström you are made fairly to feel yourself on the descending round of the vortex, convoying fleets of drift timber, and fragments of wrecks; the terrible whirl makes you giddy as you read. But in Mr. Poe, the peculiar talent to which we are indebted for Robinson Crusoe, and the memoirs of Captain Monroe, has an addition. Truthlike as nature itself, his strange fiction shows constantly the presence of a singularly adventurous, very wild, and thoroughly poetic imagination."-P. P. Cooke, in The Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1848.

"He was a man of extraordinary boldness and originality of intellect, with a power of sharp and subtle analysis that has seldom been surpassed, and an imagination singularly prolific both in creations of beauty and of terror. With these

rare gifts of invention and expression, Mr. Poe might have attained an eminent rank in literature, and even have been classed among the intellectual benefactors of society. Unhappily, he had no earnestness of character, no sincerity of conviction, no faith in human excellence, no devotion to a high purpose—not even the desire to produce a consummate work of art-and hence, his writings fail of appealing to universal principles of taste, and are destitute of the truth and naturalness, which are the only passports to an enduring reputation in literature. . . . . The effect of his writings is like breathing the air of a charnel house."-The New York Tribune, as reprinted in Littell's Living Age, April 13, 1850.

....

....

"Several of his prose tales fully equal in imaginative power, in vividness of description, and in thorough artistic finish, anything that he ever produced in a metrical form. Among several in the highest style of art, we would instance ‘Ligeia,' and 'The Fall of the House of Usher.' . . . . The impression which is made by Poe's writings, as a whole, is decidedly painful, the contrast is forced so perpetually upon us of what he was, and how he used his talents, with what he might have been, and might have accomplished, had he applied his energies to any one noble purpose. We find in him great mental power, but no mental health. His force was the preternatural activity of a strong imagination, which, curbless and uncontrolled, bore him whithersoever it would. Even his ambition had nothing ennobling in it."-The North American Review, October, 1856.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

(345) THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. The text is from the 1856 edition. The address was delivered before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837.

(348) quick-living.

(354) Druids: the priests of the ancient Celts, who offered human sacrifices. ¶ Berserkirs: heroes of Teutonic mythology, who fought naked, frenzied with liquor, and regardless of wounds. ¶Alfred: the beneficent English king of the ninth century.

(357) Macdonald: the head of a famous Scotch clan.

(361) Pestalozzi: a Swiss educational reformer (1746-1827).

(362) THE OVER-SOUL. From Essays, First Series. The text is from the 1857 edition.

(366) Zeno and Arrian: Greek Stoic philosophers of the third century B.C. and the first century A.D., respectively.

(369) Emanuel Swedenborg: cf. "The American Scholar," p. 361.

(370) "blasted with excess of light": Gray's "Progress of Poesy," III. 2. ¶ trances of Socrates: "You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything."-Plato's Apology, Jowett's translation. ¶Plotinus: a neo-Platonist, of the third century A.D., who believed in a mystic union of the human soul with the Infinite. ¶ Porphyry: a disciple of Plotinus. ¶conversion of Paul: Acts 9; cf

II Cor. 12:1-4. ¶ Behmen: Jacob Behmen (1575-1624), a German mystic, who believed that his mind was directly illumined by God; Aurora is the title of one of his works. George Fox: he founded the sect of Quakers, about 1669.

(375) Christina: queen of Sweden, who abdicated in 1654 and settled in Rome, where she became the patron of men of letters and science. ¶ said Milton: in Areopagitica.

(377) NATURE. edition.

From Essays, Second Series. The text is from the 1857

(379) villeggiatura: the word strictly means the pleasures of the country, or a period of retirement in the country; Emerson seems to have taken it to mean a village festival.

(380) Versailles: the country palace of the kings of France. ¶ Paphos: a city on the island of Cyprus, where was a famous temple of Aphrodite. ¶ Ctesiphon: a city in Mesopotamia, the site of a magnificent palace of the Persian kings. ¶ Notch Mountains: at Crawford Notch in the White Mountains, New Hampshire.

(381) Tempes: the vale of Tempe in Greece was famed for its beauty. Como Lake: in northern Italy. Campagna: the open country around Rome.

(382) take place: take precedence, have the preference. ¶euphuism: an affected way of writing, characteristic of the style of Lyly's Euphues (1579–80). ¶ quick = living.

(383) Ptolemaic schemes: Ptolemy, an Alexandrian astronomer of the second century A.D., believed that the earth was the center of the universe, which he conceived of as much smaller than it is.

(387) Jacob Behmen and George Fox: see notes above. James Naylor: a Quaker fanatic, who, believing himself to be a reincarnation of Christ, in 1655 rode into Bristol on horseback, naked, in imitation of Christ's entry into Jerusalem; he was punished for blasphemy and recanted.

(390) Edipus: the legendary Greek king who guessed the riddle of the Sphinx. (391) BEHAVIOR. From The Conduct of Life. The text is from the 1860 edition.

(392) Consuelo: the title character in a novel (1842) by George Sand. ¶ Talma: a French actor (1763-1826). ¶better the instruction: from The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene i, l. 76.

(394) frivolus Asmodeus: an evil spirit of Jewish legend; see "Tobit" in the Old Testament Apocrypha. ropes of sand to twist: a symbol of useless activity, to kill time. Charles Dickens: see his American Notes. this city: Boston. ¶ Claverhouse: a dashing Scotch soldier who fought for James II against William III; see Scott's poem, "Bonnie Dundee."

(395) an old statesman: probably John Quincy Adams. Temir: an Arabian title, signifying "leader" or "commander." Abdel-Kader: an Algerian chief taken prisoner by the French in 1847; he contributed material to a book, by a French officer, with which Emerson was acquainted.

(398) Winckelmann: the author of a famous work (1764) on ancient art Lavaler: the founder (1775-78) of the so-called science of physiognomy. ¶"the terrors of the beak": misquoted from Gray's "Progress of Poesy," I 2, "The terror of his beak," where it refers to the eagle of Jove. ¶ Balzac: a French novelist