Unlike Irving, Poe takes the idyllic dream seriously. He defines the Poetic Principle as “simply the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” manifested “in an elevating excitement of the Soul.” Of course, as every one knows, his vigorous reason controlled the decadent imagination and emotion of the earlier Gothic school and made him perhaps our greatest master of the short story technique. But let us illustrate and define the content of his “aspiration,” his “elevating excitement of the Soul.” Where does he seek happiness? One thinks of the “delirious bliss” of “the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass” in _Eleanora_. We might better, however, turn to _The Domain of Arnheim_, where Ellison, with “_a fortune of four hundred and fifty million dollars_,” seeks to satisfy his passion for an exclusively “physical loveliness,” his “four elementary conditions of bliss,” which are “free exercise,” “the love of woman,” “contempt of ambition,” and “an object of unceasing pursuit.” After a four year quest he finds in the “luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands” “an elevated tableland of wonderful fertility and beauty”; it was the “Paradise of Arnheim,” combining everything rich and voluptuous. Ellison, however, sought to gratify the “one passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty,” “above all ... in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness and love enveloped his existence in the pure atmosphere of Paradise.” Thus the content of Poe’s aspiration, as well as his references here to the “chimera of the perfectionists” “Turgot, Price, Priestley and Condorcet,” to “Fonthill,” the birthplace of _Vathek_, and to the “rapt day-dreams of De Staël,” suggest that his aspiration is essentially one with that ceaseless and aimless sensuous longing already illustrated in the English romanticists. Or take _The Island of the Fay_, which deals with the contemplation of “the glory of God” in “natural scenery”--“all within the Spirit Divine”--in a “rivulet and island,” “all one radiant harem of garden beauties.” Shelley-like, he sees approach the “enchanted” island a gentle Fay in a “fragile canoe” with a “phantom of an oar.” This vision of loveliness, however, passed “disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood,” and “darkness fell over all things and I beheld her magical figure no more.” Thus, as Professor Foerster has so finely said, Poe gives us only “shuddering harmonies of the murky subconscious, and roseate harmonies of sensuous longing posing as spirituality.... His vision oscillated not between the earthly and the supernal, but between the infernal and the Arcadian.” But what did Poe report regarding the success of his aspiration for supernal beauty? “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart,” he concludes, “is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.” Thinking of writing a book on his life, he said: “No man will ever dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared.