The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE

Qui n'a plus qu'un moment i vivre
N'a plus rien i dissimuler.
QUINAULT: Atys.
OF my country and of my family I have little to say.
Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the
one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary
wealth afforded me an education of no common ordr,
and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me o
methodize the stores which early study diligently
garnered up. Beyond all things, the works of the
German moralists gave me great delight; not frotn
any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness,
but from the ease with which my habits of rigid
thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have
often been reproached with the aridity of my genius;
a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me
as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has
at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong
relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured
my mind with a very common error of this age -I
mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the
least susceptible of such reference, to the principles
of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be
less liable than myself to be led away from the severe
precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition.
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