Poe was thoroughly persuaded that he had discovered the great secret:  that the propositions of “Eureka” were true; and he was wont to talk of the subject with a sublime and electrical enthusiasm which they cannot have forgotten who were familiar with him at the period of its publication.  He felt that an author known solely by his adventures in the lighter literature, throwing down the gauntlet to professors of science, could not expect absolute fairness, and he had no hope but in discussions led by wisdom and candor.  Meeting me, he said, “Have you read ‘Eureka?’” I answered, “Not yet:  I have just glanced at the notice of it by Willis, who thinks it contains no more fact than fantasy, and I am sorry to see—­sorry if it be true—­suggests that it corresponds in tone with that gathering of sham and obsolete hypotheses addressed to fanciful tyros, the ‘Vestiges of Creation;’ and our good and really wise friend Bush, whom you will admit to be of all the professors, in temper one of the most habitually just, thinks that while you may have guessed very shrewdly, it would not be difficult to suggest many difficulties in the way of your doctrine.”  “It is by no means ingenuous,” he replied, “to hint that there are such difficulties, and yet to leave them unsuggested.  I challenge the investigation of every point in the book.  I deny that there are any difficulties which I have not met and overthrown.  Injustice is done me by the application of this word ‘guess:’  I have assumed nothing and proved all.”  In his preface he wrote:  “To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think; to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities—­I offer this book of truths, not in the character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth:  constituting it true.  To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:—–­let us say as a Romance; or, if it be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.  What I here propound is true:  therefore it cannot die:  or it by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the life everlasting.”

When I read “Eureka” I could not help but think it immeasurably superior as an illustration of genius to the “Vestiges of Creation;” and as I admired the poem, (except the miserable attempt at humor in what purports to be a letter found in a bottle floating on the Mare tenebrarum,) so I regretted its pantheism, which is not necessary to its main design.  To some of the objections to his work be made this answer in a letter to Mr. C.F.  Hoffman, then editor of the Literary World: