. The autumn landscape tones with the melancholy house; the
somber chamber frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is
an index of the tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the grim
phantom Fear and awaiting the cumulative horror of the final moment.
In "Ligeia," which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, the
theme is the ceaseless life of the will, the potency of the spirit of
the beloved and departed woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the
workmanship consummate. So with the theme of revenge in "The Cask of
Amontillado," the theme of mysterious intrigue in "The Assignation." In
Poe's detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to
call them, he takes to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has
cunningly put together. "The Gold Bug" is the best known of these, "The
Purloined Letter" the most perfect, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" the
most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects
or displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator
loves to pose as a man without imagination and with "habits of rigid
thought." And there are tales of conscience, of which "The Black Cat"
is the most fearful and "William Wilson" the most subtle; and there are
landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor
stuff.

It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's
limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human
drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler,
he never seemed to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to
laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination
fled from the daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He
closed his eyes to dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth,
seed-time and harvest, man going forth to his toil and returning to
his hearthstone, the America that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his
finger the magic ring and the genii did his bidding. But we could wish
that the palaces they reared for him were not in such a somber land,
with such infernal lights gleaming in their windows, and crowded with
such horror-haunted forms. We could wish that his imagination dealt less
often with those primitive terrors that belong to the childhood of our
race. Yet when his spell is upon us we lapse back by a sort of atavism
into primal savagery and shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten
fears. No dou