Other aspects of life,
and nobler, he never seemed to perceive. The human comedy
sometimes moved him to laughter, but his humor is impish and his
wit malign. His imagination fled from the daylight; he dwelt in
the twilight among the tombs. He closed his eyes to dream, and
could not see the green sunlit earth, seed-time and harvest, man
going forth to his toil and returning to his hearthstone, the
America that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his finger the
magic ring and the genii did his bidding. But we could wish that
the palaces they reared for him were not in such a somber land,
with such infernal lights gleaming in their windows, and crowded
with such horror-haunted forms. We could wish that his
imagination dealt less often with those primitive terrors that
belong to the childhood of our race. Yet when his spell is upon
us we lapse back by a sort of atavism into primal savagery and
shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten fears. No doubt
Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was caged in
by his ignorance, Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised
themselves against his prison.
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