ful--more strange than pleasing, and powerful
productions without rising to the rank of genius. The author is a
strong-headed man, which epithet by no means excludes the possibility
of being, at times, wrong-headed also. With little taste, and much
analytic power, one would rather employ such an artist on the
anatomical model of the Moorish Venus, than intrust to his hands any
other sort of Venus. In fine, one is not sorry to have read these
tales; one has no desire to read them twice.

They are not framed according to the usual manner of stories. On each
occasion, it is something quite other than the mere story that the
author has in view, and which has impelled him to write. In one, he is
desirous of illustrating La Place's doctrine of probabilities as
applied to human events. In another, he displays his acumen in
unravelling or in constructing a tangled chain of circumstantial
evidence. In a third, ("The Black Cat") he appears at first to aim at
rivalling the fantastic horrors of Hoffman, but you soon observe that
the wild and horrible invention in which he deals, is strictly in the
service of an abstract idea which it is there to illustrate. His
analytic observation has led him, he thinks, to detect in men's minds
an absolute spirit of "perversity," prompting them to do the very
opposite of what reason and mankind pronounce to be right, simply
because they _do_ pronounce it to be right. The punishment of this
sort of diabolic spirit of perversity, he brings about by a train of
circumstances as hideous, incongruous, and absurd, as the sentiment
itself.

There is, in the usual sense of the word, no passion in these tales,
neither is there any attempt made at dramatic dialogue. The bent of Mr
Poe's mind seems rather to have been towards reasoning than sentiment.
The style, too, has nothing peculiarly commendable; and when the
embellishments of metaphor and illustration are attempted, they are
awkward, strained, infelicitous. But the tales rivet the attention.
There is a marvellous skill in putting together the close array of
facts and of details which make up the narrative, or the picture, for
the effect of his description, as of his story, depends never upon any
bold display of the imagination, but on the agglomeration of
incidents, enumerated in the most veracious manner. In one of his
papers he describes the Mahlstrom or what he chooses to imagine the
Mahlstrom may be, and by dint of this careful and De Foe-like