ple, is quite incomprehensible, and yet
to all readers of poetic feeling is among the most characteristic, and,
therefore, the most fascinating, of its author's creations.

Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad, _Annabel Lee_, and _To One in
Paradise_, the poet emerges into the light of common human feeling and
speaks a more intelligible language. But in general his poetry is not
the poetry of the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh
and blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of the
shadowy borderland between death and life.

"The play is the tragedy 'Man,'
And its hero the Conqueror Worm,"

{532}

The prose tale, _Ligeia_, in which these verses are inserted, is one of
the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of
the will to overcome death. In that singularly impressive poem, the
_Sleeper_, the morbid horror which invests the tomb springs from the
same source, the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let
the soul go free from the body.

This quality explains why Poe's _Tales of the Grotesque_ and
_Arabesque_, 1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's romances, to
which a few of them, like _William Wilson_ and the _Man of the Crowd_,
have some resemblance. The former of these, in particular, is in
Hawthorne's peculiar province, the allegory of the conscience. But in
general the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in
the aid of material forces. The passion of physical fear or of
superstitious horror is that which his writings most frequently excite.
These tales represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly,
from the mere bug-a-boo story like the _Black Cat_, which makes
children afraid to go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the
_Cask of Amontillado_, or the _Red Death_. Poe's masterpiece in this
kind is the fateful tale of the _Fall of the House of Usher_, with its
solemn and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls,
in its richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such
passages as his _Dream Fugue_, or _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. In {533}
descriptive pieces like the _Domain of Arnheim_, and stories of
adventure like the _Descent into the Maelstrom_, and his long sea tale,
_The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_, 1838, he displayed a realistic
inventiveness almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. He was not without
a mocking irony, but he had no constructive humor, a