Short Fiction, Edgar Allan Poe [best autobiographies to read TXT] 📗

vase of brilliant geranium. On a triangular shelf in each angle of the room stood also a similar vase, varied only as to its lovely contents. One or two smaller bouquets adorned the mantel, and late violets clustered about the open windows.

It is not the purpose of this work to do more than give, in detail, a picture of Mr. Landor’s residence⁠—as I found it.

Endnotes

These remarks were published by Mr. Willis in the Home Journal, on the Saturday following Mr. Poe’s death. ↩

Mercier, in “L’an deux mille quatre cents quarante”, seriously maintains the doctrines of the Metempsychosis, and J. D’Israeli says that “no system is so simple and so little repugnant to the understanding.” Colonel Ethan Allen, the “Green Mountain Boy,” is also said to have been a serious metempsychosist. ↩

Montfleury. The author of the Parnasse Réformé makes him speak in Hades:

“L’homme donc qui voudrait savoir ce dont je suis mort, qui’l ne demande pas si’l fût de fievre ou de podagre ou d’autre chose mais qui’l entende que ce fut de ‘L’Andromache.’ ”

↩

Tenera res in feminis fama pudicitiæ, et quasi flos pulcherrimus, citoad levem marcescit auram, levigue flatu corrupitur, maxime, etc.

—⁠Hieronymous ad Salviniam

↩

φρενός. ↩

Ils ecrivaient sur la Philosophie (Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca) mais c’etait la Philosophie Grecque.

—⁠Condorcet

↩

Quere-Aroue? ↩

The “MS. Found in a Bottle,” was originally published in 1831, and it was not until many years afterwards that I became acquainted with the maps of Mercator, in which the ocean is represented as rushing, by four mouths, into the (northern) Polar Gulf, to be absorbed into the bowels of the earth; the Pole itself being represented by a black rock, towering to a prodigious height. ↩

For as Jove, during the winter season, gives twice seven days of warmth, men have called this clement and temperate time the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon.

—⁠Simonides

↩

The zodiacal light is probably what the ancients called Trabes.

Emicant Trabes quos docos vocant.

—⁠Pliny, lib. 2, p. 26.

↩

Since the original publication of Hans Pfaall, I find that Mr. Green, of Nassau-balloon notoriety, and other late aeronauts, deny the assertions of Humboldt, in this respect, and speak of a decreasing inconvenience⁠—precisely in accordance with the theory here urged. ↩

Hevelius writes that he has several times found, in skies perfectly clear, when even stars of the sixth and seventh magnitude were conspicuous, that, at the same altitude of the moon, at the same elongation from the earth, and with one and the same excellent telescope, the moon and its maculae did not appear equally lucid at all times. From the circumstances of the observation, it is evident that the cause of this phenomenon is not either in our air, in the tube, in the moon, or in the eye of the spectator, but must be looked for in something (an atmosphere?) existing about the moon.

Cassini frequently observed Saturn, Jupiter, and the fixed stars, when approaching the moon to occultation, to have their circular figure changed into an oval one; and, in other occultations, he found no alteration of figure at all. Hence it might be supposed, that at some times, and not at others, there is a dense matter encompassing the moon wherein the rays of the stars are refracted. ↩

Strictly speaking, there is but little similarity between the above sketchy trifle and the celebrated “Moon-Story” of Mr. Locke; but as both have the character of hoaxes (although the one is in a tone of banter, the other of downright earnest), and as both hoaxes are on the same subject, the moon⁠—moreover, as both attempt to give plausibility by scientific detail⁠—the author of “Hans Pfaall” thinks it necessary to say, in self-defence, that his own jeu d’esprit was published in the Southern Literary Messenger about three weeks before the commencement of Mr. L.’s in the New York Sun. Fancying a likeness which, perhaps, does not exist, some of the New York papers copied “Hans Pfaall,” and collated it with the “Moon-Hoax,” by way of detecting the writer of the one in the writer of the other.

As many more persons were actually gulled by the “Moon-Hoax” than would be willing to acknowledge the fact, it may here afford some little amusement to show why no one should have been deceived-to point out those particulars of the story which should have been sufficient to establish its real character. Indeed, however rich the imagination displayed in this ingenious fiction, it wanted much of the force which might have been given it by a more scrupulous attention to facts and to general analogy. That the public were misled, even for an instant, merely proves the gross ignorance which is so generally prevalent upon subjects of an astronomical nature.

The moon’s distance from the earth is, in round numbers, 240,000 miles. If we desire to ascertain how near, apparently, a lens would bring the satellite (or any distant object), we, of course, have but to divide the distance by the magnifying or, more strictly, by the space-penetrating power of the glass. Mr. L. makes his lens have a power of 42,000 times. By this divide 240,000 (the moon’s real distance), and we have five miles and five sevenths, as the apparent distance. No animal at all could be seen so far; much less the minute points particularized in the story. Mr. L. speaks about Sir John Herschel’s perceiving flowers (the Papaver rheas, etc.), and even detecting the color and the shape of the eyes of small birds. Shortly before, too, he has himself observed that the lens would not render perceptible objects of less than eighteen inches in diameter; but even this, as