The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [854]
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The whole of Bulwer's elaborate argument on the immortality of the soul, which he has put into the mouth of the "Ambitious Student," may be confuted through the author's omission of one particular point in his summary of the attributes of Deity — a point which we cannot believe omitted altogether through accident. A single link is deficient in the chain — but the chain is worthless without it. No man doubts the immortality of the soul — yet of all truths this truth of immortality is the most difficult to prove by any mere series of syllogisms. We would refer our readers to the argument here mentioned.
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The rude rough wild waste has its power to please,
a line in one Mr. Odiorne's poem, "The Progress of Refinement," is pronounced by the American author of a book entitled "Ante-Diluvian Antiquities," "the very best alliteration in all poetry."
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The Turkish Spy is the original of many similar works — among the best of which are Montesquieu's Persian Letters, and the British Spy of our own Wirt. It was written undoubtedly by John Paul Marana, an Italian, ins Italian, but probably was first published in French. Dr. Johnson, who saw only an English translation, supposed it an English work. Marana died in 1693.
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The hunter and the deer a shade
is a much admired line in Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming — but the identical line is to be found in the poems of the American Freneau.
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Corneille's celebrated, Moi of Medea is borrowed from Seneca. Racine, in Phoedra, has stolen nearly the whole scene of the declaration of love from the same puerile writer.
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The peculiar zodiac of the comets is comprised in these verses of Cassini —
Antinous, Pegasusque, Andromeda, Taurus, Orion,
Procyon, atque Hydrus, Centaurus, Scorpius, Arcus.
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Speaking of the usual representation of the banquet scene in Macbeth, Von Raumer, the German historian, mentions a shadowy figure thrown by optical means into the chair of Banquo, and producing intense effect upon the audience. Enslen, a German optician, conceived this idea, and accomplished it without difficulty.
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A religious hubbub, such as the world has seldom seen, was excited, during the reign of Frederic II, by the imagined virulence of a book entitled "The Three Impostors." It was attributed to Pierre des Vignes, chancellor of the king, who was accused by the Pope of having treated the religions of Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet as political fables. The work in question, however, which was squabbled about, abused, defended, and familiarly quoted by all parties, is well proved never to have existed.
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The word [[Greek text=]]TvXn [[=Greek Text]], or Fortune, does not appear once in the whole Iliad.
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The "Lamentations" of Jeremiah are written, with the exception of the last chapter, in acrostic verse: that is to say, every line or couplet begins, in alphabetical order, with some letter in the Hebrew alphabet. In the third chapter each letter is repeated three times successively.
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The fullest account of the Amazons is to be found in Diodorus Siculus.
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Theophrastus, in his botanical works, anticipated the sexual system of Linnaeus. Philolaus of Crotona maintained that comets appeared after a certain revolution and AEcetes contended for the existence of what is now called the new world. Pulci, "the sire of the half -serious rhyme," has a passage expressly alluding to a western continent. Dante, two centuries before, has the same allusion.
De vostri sensi ch e del rimanente
Non vogliate negar l'esperenza
Diretro al sol, del mondo sensa gente.
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Cicero makes finis masculine, Virgil feminine. Usque ad eum finem — Cicero. Quae finis standi? Haec finis Priami fatorum — Virgil.
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Dante left a poem in