ssive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the
realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intellectual nature there
was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Shelley's,
though, unlike Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and
the imagery of ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific
exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a
mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of
his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects,
such as repetition, and monotone, and the selection of words in which
the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his _Philosophy
of Composition_ he described how his best known poem, the _Raven_, was
systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of
lines was first determined and the word "nevermore" selected as a
starting point. No one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed
will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes
the way in {529} which the _Raven_ was conceived and written, or that
any such deliberate and self-conscious process could _originate_ the
associations from which a true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's
pride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control not
only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of
thought and emotion. Some of his most successful stories, like the
_Gold Bug_, the _Mystery of Marie Roget_, the _Purloined Letter_, and
the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_, were applications of this analytic
faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried
treasure or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious
crime. After the publication of the _Gold Bug_ he received from all
parts of the country specimens of cipher writing, which he delighted to
work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification,
like _Hans Pfaall_, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments
at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful
introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this
kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie
Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less
degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett
Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While Dickens's
_Bar