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.

THE ISLAND OF THE FAY
-which owes even more than does music to the
accessory sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness experienced in the contemplation of natural
scenery. In truth, the man who would behold aright
the glory of God. upon earth must in solitude behold
that glory. To me, at least, the presence -not of
human life only, but of life in any other form than
that of the green things which grow upon the soil, and
are voiceless - is a stain upon the landscape, is at war
with the genius of the scene. I love indeed to regard
the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters
that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy
slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look
down upon all - I love to regard these as themselves
but the colossal members of one vast animate and
sentient whole: a whole whose form (that of the
sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all;
whose path is among associate planets; whose meek
handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign is
the sun; whose life is eternity; whose thought is that
of a God; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose
destinies are lost in immensity; whose cognizance of
ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the
animalculae which infest the brain - a being which
we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and
material, much in the same manner as these animalcul&e
must thus regard us.: Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations
assure us on every hand, notwithstanding the cant of
the more ignorant of the priesthood, that space, and
therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in
the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the
stars move are those best adapted for the evolution,
without collision, of the greatest possible number of
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