but unapproachable. It was the
first of detective-stories, and it has had thousands of imitations and
no rival. The originality, the ingenuity, the verisimilitude of this
tale and of its fellows are beyond all praise. Poe had a faculty which
one may call imaginative ratiocination to a decree beyond all other
writers of fiction. He did not at all times keep up to the high level,
in one style, of "The Fall of the House of Usher," and in another, of
"The Murders in the Hue Morgue;" and it was not to be expected that he
should, Only too often did he sink to the grade of the ordinary "Tale
from 'Blackwood,'" which he himself satirized in his usual savage vein
of humor. Yet even in his flimsiest and most tawdry tales we see the
truth of Mr. Lowell's assertion that Poe had "two of the prime qualities
of genius,--a faculty of vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful
fecundity of imagination." Mr. Lowell said also that Poe combined "in a
very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united,--a
power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of
mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a
button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the
predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before
alluded,--analysis." In Poe's hands, however, the enumeration of pins
and buttons, the exact imitation of the prosaic facts of humdrum life in
this workaday world, is not an end, but a means only, whereby he
constructs and intensifies the shadow of mystery which broods over the
things thus realistically portrayed.

With the recollection that it is more than half a century since
Hawthorne and Poe wrote their best Short-stories, it is not a little
comic to see now and again in American newspapers a rash assertion that
"American literature has hitherto been deficient in good Short-stories,"
or the reckless declaration that "the art of writing Short-stories has
not hitherto been cultivated in the United States." Nothing could be
more inexact than these statements. Almost as soon as America began to
have any literature at all it had good Short-stories. It is quite within
ten, or at the most twenty, years that the American novel has come to
the front and forced the acknowledgment of its equality with the English
novel and the French novel; but for fifty years the American
Short-story has had a supremacy which any competent critic could not but
acknowledge. Indeed, th