nstinctively and takes only the vital detail, by some
sort of spiritual gravitation goes directly to the right thing.

Poe belonged to the modern French school of decorative and
discriminating prose before it ever existed in France. He rivalled
Gautier, Flaubert and de Maupassant before they were born. He
clothed his tales in a barbaric splendor and persuasive unreality
never before heard of in English. No such profusion of color,
oriental splendor of detail, grotesque combinations and mystical
effects had ever before been wrought into language. There are tales
as grotesque, as monstrous, unearthly as the stone griffens and
gargoyles that are cut up among the unvisited niches and towers of
Notre Dame, stories as poetic and delicately beautiful as the golden
lace work chased upon an Etruscan ring. He fitted his words together
as the Byzantine jewelers fitted priceless stones. He found the
inner harmony and kinship of words. Where lived another man who
could blend the beautiful and the horrible, the gorgeous and the
grotesque in such intricate and inexplicable fashion? Who could
delight you with his noun and disgust you with his verb, thrill you
with his adjective and chill you with his adverb, make you run the
whole gamut of human emotions in a single sentence? Sitting in that
miserable cottage at Fordham he wrote of the splendor of dream
palaces beyond the dreams of art. He hung those grimy walls with
dream tapestries, paved those narrow halls with black marble and
polished onyx, and into those low-roofed chambers he brought all the
treasured imagery of fancy, from the "huge carvings of untutored
Egypt" to "mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from strange
convolute censers, together with multitudinous, flaring and
flickering tongues of purple and violet fire." Hungry and ragged he
wrote of Epicurean feasts and luxury that would have beggared the
purpled pomp of pagan Rome and put Nero and his Golden House to
shame.

And this mighty master of the organ of language, who knew its every
stop and pipe, who could awaken at will the thin silver tones of its
slenderest reeds or the solemn cadence of its deepest thunder, who
could make it sing like a flute or roar like a cataract, he was born
into a country without a literature. He was of that ornate school
which usually comes last in a national literature, and he came
first. American taste had been vitiated by men like Griswold and N.
P. Willis until it was at the l