gO proce;kdings Manchester institute 



sued gives you the uneasy sense that he is chuckling at you 

 while he has you under his spell. He is deeply interested in 

 his work, but never quite in earnest. Poe did not serve truth. 

 He had no thoughts to convey. His writing represents nothing 

 but his own skill. His art was for its own sake. He was a 

 clever cabinet-maker in words. 



Where then is the secret of his influence, his undoubted pow- 

 er, the spell he exercises upon the mind ? We find it in a rare 

 combination of cool intellectual analysis with a strong sensuous 

 imagination. 



This analytic power is exceedingly keen even when shrouded 

 in the mystical vagueness which he loved. This is the element 

 by which he made the improbable and the impossible seem act- 

 ual. The construction of his tales and many of his poems is 

 superb. It is the work of a very acute intellect arranging in ad- 

 vance the ingenious details of a scheme. His mind, that is, by 

 the power of analysis foresaw and reasoned out all the elements 

 of a problem and then fitted them together so accurately as to 

 leave the jointures almost invisible. His mind was of the order 

 which is required by the inventor of puzzles. His tales of mys- 

 tery and of the solution of mysteries are a witness of this intense 

 analytical power. Another evidence is found in the astonishing 

 fact, that, in a criticism upon some of the first numbers of 

 Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, then issuing in parts, he drew 

 a clear outline of the plot Dickens had then in mind, and as 

 yet unwritten. The minutest details, the values of the sepa- 

 rate words are weighed deliberately and fitted into the structure 

 of the composition as delicately and purposively as in the 

 cabinet maker's art, or as in some specimen of marquetry. 

 In this respect they bear close study. Few minds of high order 

 have been able to stand aloof from their creations in this fashion 

 and reason out the mechanism that produces the desired effect. 

 But Poe cooly devised, it would seem, the joints and wires that 

 would move his figures and display them to the best advantage 

 in the eyes of the spectators. It was entirely in accord with this 

 power of keen analysis that he became absorbed in the study of 

 cryptograms and maintained in public that no cryptogram could 



