ans show something like a national
tendency. The description here is very unlike that with which Burnet
closes his "Theory of the Earth;" it is confined to the natural
history of the event; but there is nothing whatever in Mr Poe's manner
to diminish from the sacredness or the sublimity of the topic. With
some account of this singular and characteristic paper we shall
dismiss the volume of Mr Poe.

The world has been destroyed. Eiros, who was living at the time,
relates to Charmion, who had died some years before, the nature of the
last awful event.

"I need scarcely tell you," says the disembodied spirit, "that
even when you left us, men had agreed to understand those passages
in the most holy writings which speak of the final destruction of
all things by fire, as having reference to the orb of the earth
alone. But in regard to the immediate agency of the ruin,
speculation had been at fault from that epoch in astronomical
knowledge in which the comets were divested of the terrors of
flame. The very moderate density of these bodies had been well
established. They had been observed to pass among the satellites
of Jupiter without bringing about any sensible alteration either
in the masses or in the orbits of these secondary planets. We had
long regarded the wanderers as vapoury creations of inconceivable
tenuity, and as altogether incapable of doing injury to our
substantial globe, even in the event of contact. But contact was
not in any degree dreaded; for the elements of all the comets were
accurately known. That among _them_ we should look for the agency
of the threatened fiery destruction, had been for many years
considered an inadmissible idea. But wonders and wild fancies had
been, of late days, strangely rife among mankind; and although it
was only with a few of the ignorant that actual apprehension
prevailed upon the announcement by astronomers of a _new comet_,
yet this announcement was generally received with I know not what
of agitation and mistrust.

"The elements of the strange orb were immediately calculated, and
it was at once conceded by all observers that its path, at
perihelion, would bring it into very close proximity with the
earth. There were two or three astronomers, of secondary note, who
resolutely maintained that a contact was inevitable. I cannot very
well express to you the eff