The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5


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THE MAN OF THE CROWD.  
Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul.  
La Bruyère.  
IT was well said of a certain German book that "er lasst sich nicht  
lesen"--it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets  
which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their  
beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them  
piteously in the eyes--die with despair of heart and convulsion of  
throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer  
themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man  
takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only  
into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.  
Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the  
large bow window of the D----- Coffee-House in London. For some months  
I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning  
strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so  
precisely the converse of ennui--moods of the keenest appetency, when  
the film from the mental vision departs--the [Greek phrase]--and the  
intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition,  
as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy  
rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived  
positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I  
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42 43 44 45 46

Quick Jump
1 101 202 302 403