ecked in the Simoom and hurled on
the crest of a towering billow into a gigantic ship manned by a
hoary crew who glide uneasily to and fro "like the ghosts of
buried centuries," forecast the more frightful horrors of _A
Descent into the Maelstrom_ (1841). Poe's method in both stories
is to induce belief by beginning with a circumstantial narrative
of every-day events, and by proceeding to relate the most
startling phenomena in the same calm, matter-of-fact manner. The
whirling abyss of the Maelstrom in which the tiny boat is
engulfed, and the sensations of the fishermen--awe, wonder,
horror, curiosity, hope, alternating or intermingled--are
described with the same quiet precision as the trivial
preliminary adventures. The man's dreary expectation of
incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story. In
_The Manuscript Found in a Bottle_, too, we may trace the first
suggestion of that idea which finds its most complete and
memorable expression in _Ligeia_ (1837). The antique ship, with
its preternaturally aged crew "doomed to hover continually upon
the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the
abyss," is an early foreshadowing of the fulfilment of Joseph
Glanvill's declaration so strikingly illustrated in the return of
Ligeia: "Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death
utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." In
_Ligeia_, Poe concentrates on this idea with singleness of
purpose. He had striven to embody it in his earlier sketches, in
_Morella_, where the beloved is reincarnated in the form of her
own child, in the musical, artificial _Eleonora_ and in the
gruesome _Berenice_. In _Ligeia_, at last, it finds its
appropriate setting in the ebony bridal-chamber, hung with gold
tapestries grotesquely embroidered with fearful shapes and
constantly wafted to and fro, like those in one of the _Episodes
of Vathek_. In _The Fall of the House of Usher_ he adapts the
theme which he had approached in the sketch entitled _Premature
Burial_, and unites with it a subtler conception, the sentience
of the vegetable world. Like the guest of Roderick Usher, as we
enter the house we fall immediately beneath the overmastering
sway of its irredeemable, insufferable gloom. The melancholy
building, Usher's wild musical improvisations, his vague but
awful paintings, his mystical reading and his eerie verses with
the last haunting stanza:

"And travellers now within that valley
T