bout this period some of his
most remarkable and characteristic works in a department of imaginative
composition in which he was henceforth alone and unapproachable. "The Fall
of the House of Usher" and "Legeia", are the most interesting
illustrations of his mental organization--his masterpieces in a peculiar
vein of romantic creation. They have theunquestionable stamp of genius.
The analyses of the growth of madness in one, and the thrilling
revelations of the existence of a first wife in the person of a second,
in the other, are made with consummate skill; and the strange and solemn
and fascinating beauty which informs the style and invests the
circumstances of both, drugs the mind, and makes us forget the
improbabilities of their general design.

An awakened ambition and the healthful influence of a conviction that his
works were appreciated, and that his fame was increasing, led him for a
while to cheerful views of life, and to regular habits of conduct. He
wrote to a friend, the author of "Edge Hill," in Richmond, that he had
quite overcome "the seductive and dangerous besetment" by which he had so
often been prostrated, and to another friend that, incredible as it might
seem, he had become a "model of temperance," and of "other virtues,"
which it had sometimes been difficult for him to practice. Before the
close of the summer, however, he relapsed into his former courses, and
for weeks was regardless of everything but a morbid and insatiable
appetite for the means of intoxication.

In the autumn he published all the prose stories he had then written, in
two volumes, under the title of "Tales of the Grotesque and the
Arabesque." The work was not salable, perhaps because its contents were
too familiar from recent separate publication in magazines; and it was
not so warmly praised, generally, as I think it should have been, though
in point of style the pieces which it embraced are much less perfect than
they were made subsequently.

He was with Mr. Burton until June, 1840--more than a year. Mr. Burton
Appreciated his abilities and would have gladly continued the connection;
but Poe was so unsteady of purpose and so unreliable that the actor was
never sure when he left the city that his business would be cared for. On
one occasion, returning after the regular day of publication, he found
the number unfinished, and Poe incapable of duty. He prepared the
necessary copy himself, published the magazine, and was proceedi