This manuscript fragment comes from an installment of "Marginalia" that appeared in Southern Literary Messenger in June of 1849 (vol. 15, no. 6, p. 337, 338). In "Marginialia," Poe offers aphorisms on genius, authorship, art, philosophy, irrationality, and many other subjects. Note that the second half of the manuscript represented here ("the passions are like those Demons...") is a double plagiarism: Poe took the passage from Horace Binney Wallace's (aka William Landor) "Mems for Memory," and had previously used it as the concluding paragraph to his tale "Premature Burial" (Silverman 397-98).

     
no greater torture than that of being
charged with abnormal weakness on
account of being abnormally strong.

     
In like manner, nothing can
be clearer than that a very generous
spirit -- truly feeling what all mere-
ly profess -- must inevitably find
itself misconceived in every direct-
ion -- its motives misinterpreted.
Just as extremeness of intelligence
would be thought fatuity, so excess
of chivalry could not fail of being
looked upon as meanness in its
last degree: -- and so on with other
virtues. This subject is a painful
one indeed. That individuals have
so soared above the plane of their
race, is scarcely to be questioned;
but, in looking back through his-
tory for traces of their existence, we
should pass over all biographies
of "the good and the great," while
we search carefully the slight re-
cords of wretches who died in pri-
son, in Bedlam, or upon the gal-
lows.

     
this, to explore with impunity its
every cavern. Alas! the grim legion
of sepulchral terrors cannot be re-
garded as altogether fanciful; but,
like the Demons in whose company
Afrasiab made his voyage down
the Oxus, they must sleep, or they
will devour us -- they must be suffered
to slumber, or we perish.

     
30.