Poe's Works

Hear "A Dream" Read Aloud. A Dream   In visions of the dark nightI have dream’d of joy departed —But a waking dream of life and lightHath left me broken hearted: And what is not a dream by dayTo him whose eyes are castOn things around him with a rayTurn’d back upon the past? That holy dream — that holy dream,While all the world were chiding,Hath cheer’d me as a lovely beamA lonely spirit guiding:  What tho’ that light, thro’ storm and nightSo trembled from afar —What could there be more purely brightIn Truth's day-star? — Edgar Allan Poe Published 1829 (Earlier ...

The Imp Of The Perverse In the consideration of the faculties and impulses — of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the reason we have all overlooked it. We have suffered its existence to escape our senses solely through want of belief — of faith — whether it be faith in Revelation or faith in the inner teachings of the spirit. Its idea ...

Hop-Frog I never knew any one so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kind, and to tell it well, was the surest road to his favor. Thus it happened that his 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, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine; but certain it is that a lean joker is ...

The Unparalleled Adventure OF One Hans Pfaall With a heart of furious fancies, Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander.Tom O’Bedlam's Song. By late accounts from Rotterdam, that city seems to be in a high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected — so entirely novel — so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions — as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all physics in a ferment, all reason and astronomy together by ...