Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." It was Poe's conviction that consciousness per sisted even in the grave, and that the will, because of some great passion, could resist dissolution, and that the persistence of the human will gave sentience to inanimate things. Thus the walls of the house of Usher and the tarn beyond have been given a sort of organisation and in A MS. found in a Bottle the ship that holds the ancient voyagers has grown in bulk.

Poe's mentality was a rare synthesis; he had elements in him that corresponded with the indefiniteness of music and the exactitude of mathematics. He was a penetrating critic of literature, and he could have written well on aesthetics and psychology; I have already dwelt upon his sense of the theatre. He desired to be striking and original as the great creators desire to be sincere, and because of that rare synthesis of his mind (helped out, it must be said, by a wonderful ingenuity), he succeeded in making forms and formulas that have in-iiuenced a definite side of literature. His often-quoted dictum that poetry cannot be sustained in the epic form has forced many poets (Whitman amongst them) to reconsider the poetic form. His achievements in verse and his theories of versifi cation influenced an important literary movement in France, and that movement has reacted on contemporary English literature. He made the idea of " atmosphere " self-conscious in literary art. The Murders in the Rue Morgue and William Wilson have been models for such diverse writers as Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. He is popularly regarded as the type of the imaginative man, but those who have come into contact with his mind have reason to believe that his critical faculties were in excess of his imaginative and creative faculties. In The Domain of Arnheim he says some subtle thing on our ideas of the beautiful. His aesthetics, however, are a little strained by the undue importance he gives to strangeness as an element of beauty. He was a psychologist in the critical rather than

In the creative sense, and had a deep knowledge of the mental movements connected with fear. In Arthur Gordon Pym he has some enlightening observations on the effect of a ghostly apparition.

" Usually, in cases of a similar nature, there is left in the mind of the spectator some glimmering of doubt as to the reality of the vision before his eyes; a degree of hope, however feeble, that he is the victim of chicanery, and that the appari tion is not actually a visitant from the old world of shadows. It is not too much to say that such remnants of doubt have been at the bottom of almost every such visitation, and that the appalling horror which has sometimes been brought about is to be attributed, even in the cases most in point, and where most suffering has been experienced, more to a kind of anti-cipative horror, lest the apparition might possibly be real, than to an unwavering belief in its reality."

This reads like an authentic pronouncement from a chair of psychology. And in The Fall of the House of Usher he has a sentence which anticipates, even in its formal presentment, a recently formulated law of the American psychologists— " There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of iny superstition . . . served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the para doxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis."

Edgar Allan Poe has written some gloomy tales and several morbid tales, but his lines,

" The play is the tragedy Man, And the hero the conquering Worm,"

do not represent his normal opinion. He has told us that " in general, it is from the violation of a few simple laws of humanity, arises the wretchedness of mankind—that as a species we have in our possession the as yet unwrought elements of content." His Mr. Ellison admitted but four principles or conditions of bliss—free exercise in the open air. the love of some lovable woman, a contempt of ambition, and an object of unceasing pursuit. " He held that, other things being equal, the extent of attainable happiness was in propor tion to the spirituality of this object."

" NOR WAS I INDEED IGNORANT OF THE FLOWERS AND THE VINE, BUT THB HEMLOCK AND THE CYPRESS OVERSHADOWED MB NIGHT AND DAY." ,

PADRAIC COLUM.

April 1908.

The following is a list of his published works:—

Tamerlane and other Poems, 1827; new edition with additions, " Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems," 1829; Poems, 1831; A Manuscript found in a Bottle (prize tale for the Baltimore Saturday Visitor), 1833; Coliseum, Poem, 1833 (prize poem for same, but ruled out as being by author of prize tale); Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pyrn (partly from the Messenger, 1838; Conchologist's First Book (from Thomas Wyatt's Manual of Conchology), 1839; Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, 1839; Prediction of the Plot of Barnaby Rudge (Saturday Evening Post), 1841; Murders in the Rue Morgue (Graham's Magazine), 1841; The Gold Bug (prize offered by the Dollar Newspaper), 1843; Balloon Hoax (in the Sun), 1844; Tales, 1845; The Raven (Evening Mirror), 1845; The Raven and other Poems, 1845; Eureka, a prose Poem (elaborated from his lecture on the Cosmogony of the Universe), 1848.

Some of Poe's best tales and poems were first published in the Southern Literary Messenger, 1835, of which magazine he became editor, but resigned the post in 1837; other tales appeared in Graham's Magazine, of which fie was for a time editor-in-chief. He was also a contributor to the New York Review, Broadway Journal, and Godey's Lady's Book.

WORKS. —First collection, ed. R. W. Griswold (with memoir), three vols., 1850; four vols., 1856; ed. H.