The Slender Poe Anthology Read Online Free PDF

one of my favorite spells of his, and what it means to me is never the same twice—and maybe that’s intended as well.

TO ONE IN PARADISE
    Thou wast all that to me, love,
    For which my soul did pine—
    A green isle in the sea, love,
    A fountain and a shrine,
    All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
    And all the flowers were mine.
    Ah, dream too bright to last!
    Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
    But to be overcast!
    A voice from out the Future cries,
    â€œOn! on!”—but o’er the Past
    (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
    Mute, motionless, aghast!
    For, alas! alas! with me
    The light of Life is o’er!
    No more—no more—no more—
    (Such language holds the solemn sea
    To the sands upon the shore)
    Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,
    Or the stricken eagle soar!
    And all my days are trances,
    And all my nightly dreams
    Are where thy dark eye glances,
    And where thy footstep gleams—
    In what ethereal dances,
    By what eternal streams.

    In an 1835 letter to the man who would give him his first job as an editor, Thomas W. White, Poe explains that, though the subject of his tale, Berenice , is horrible, “The history of all Magazines show plainly that those which attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles “ similar in nature —to Berenice .” Of what does this nature consist? “In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
    In 1840, two volumes of Poe’s works were published in Philadelphia, each bearing the title, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . There are more arabesques in this collection than grotesques, but this wonderful grotesque on the old folktale theme of revenge is one of his best; it was his last tale to be published, brought out in Boston by The Flag of Our Union in March of 1849.
    The following year, the sixth edition of The Children’s and Household Tales , by the Brothers Grimm, was published in Germany.

HOP-FROG
    I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemedto live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kind, and totell it well, was the surest road to his favor. Thus it happened thathis seven ministers were all noted for their accomplishments as jokers.They all took after the king, too, in being large, corpulent, oily men,as well as inimitable jokers. Whether people grow fat by joking, orwhether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, Ihave never been quite able to determine; but certain it is that a leanjoker is a rara avis in terris .
    About the refinements, or, as he called them, the ‘ghost’ of wit, theking troubled himself very little. He had an especial admiration for breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length , for the sakeof it. Over-niceties wearied him. He would have preferred Rabelais’‘Gargantua’ to the ‘Zadig’ of Voltaire: and, upon the whole, practicaljokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones.
    At the date of my narrative, professing jesters had not altogether goneout of fashion at court. Several of the great continental ‘powers’ stillretain their ‘fools,’ who wore motley, with caps and bells, and who wereexpected to be always ready with sharp witticisms, at a moment’s notice,in consideration of the crumbs that fell from the royal table.
    Our king, as a matter of course, retained his ‘fool.’ The fact is, he required something in the way of folly — if only to counterbalancethe heavy wisdom of the seven wise men who were his ministers — not tomention himself.
    His fool, or professional jester, was not only a fool, however. Hisvalue was trebled in the eyes of the king, by the fact of his being alsoa dwarf and a cripple. Dwarfs were as common at court, in those days,as fools; and many monarchs would have found