d it been submitted to me I might indeed have changed
it in one or two instances, but I should not have replaced any tale by
one of a different tone. One of the qualities upon which Poe prides
himself was his humor, and he has left us a large number of compositions
in this department, but except a few paragraphs in his "Marginalia,"
scarcely anything which it would not have been injurious to his
reputation to republish. His realm was on the shadowy confines of human
experience, among the abodes of crime, gloom, and horror, and there he
delighted to surround himself with images of beauty and of terror, to
raise his solemn palaces and towers and spires in a night upon which
should rise no sun. His minuteness of detail, refinement of reasoning,
and propriety and power of language--the perfect keeping (to borrow a
phrase from another domain of art) and apparent good faith with which he
managed the evocation and exhibition of his strange and spectral and
revolting creations--gave him an astonishing mastery over his readers, so
that his books were closed as one would lay aside the nightmare or the
spells of opium. The analytical subtlety evinced in his works has
frequently been overestimated, as I have before observed, because it has
not been sufficiently considered that his mysteries were composed with
the express design of being dissolved. When Poe attempted the
illustration of the profounder operations of the mind, as displayed in
written reason or in real action, he frequently failed entirely.

In poetry, as in prose, he was eminently successful in the metaphysical
treatment of the passions. Hia poems are constructed with wonderful
ingenuity, and finished with consummate art. They display a somber and
weird imagination, and a taste almost faultless in the apprehension of
that sort of beauty which was most agreeable to his temper. But they
evince little genuine feeling, and less of that spontaneous ecstasy which
gives its freedom, smoothness and naturalness to immortal verse. His own
account of the composition of "The Raven," discloses his methods--the
absence of all impulse, and the absolute control of calculation and
mechanism. That curious analysis of the processes by which he wrought
would be incredible if from another hand.

He was not remarkably original in invention. Indeed some of his
plagiarisms are scarcely paralleled for their audacity in all literary
history: For instance, in his tale of "The Pit and the Pendul