And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
—W.B. Yeats

To Poe’s so acute, so prophetic meditation of 150 years ago—that the truly extraordinary mind or spirit would necessarily find itself isolated, hated, and misunderstood by the society in which it appeared, and, especially, that news of the eminently great should not be sought in biographies but in “the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows”—the life of Joseph Clifton Case bears haunting testimony.

In all of recorded history, who but Case so intimately sensed the dread duality of all things, and so personally suffered this jarring collision of opposites, with less rancor or self-pity, less sorrow or hope?

Because he understood those emotions were barred to him, by himself from himself, for our better good .…

The Gethsemane of knowing in one’s deepest heart that each moment’s action will bring an unknown, nearly immediate, and always contradicting reaction; that this law is iron-clad and inescapable; and that in one’s own person one has been chosen to endure and by example bear the truth of this law into the world—such knowledge must utterly destroy or transfigure a mere mortal.…