POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 45 



entirely free from those personal influences winch at times 

 deflect the judgment of most critics: he was sometimes led 

 away l>y the showy brilliancy of a momentary success; his 

 poise w.is disturbed by his own conditions; he often wrote 

 under greal pressure and without due consideration and self- 

 restraint, llis critical work was. however, in the main. 

 sound, wholesome, and of great value in educating public 

 opinion. The fact that his estimates of Bryant, Cooper, 

 Hawthorne, Lowell, and Tennyson, formed when these writers 

 were making the first disclosures of their genius, were larger} 

 predictive of the judgment of a later and more critical age, 

 is conclusive evidence of his possession of critical insight and 

 pi nver. 



In a short story published in " The Southern Literary Mes- 

 senger " in [835 Poe brought onto the stage a figure that was 

 to become typical in his fiction and to reappear again and again. 

 under various names, in his later work. F.gauis in Berenice 

 belongs to the race of visionaries whose sphere of interest and 

 experience touches the realities of life only at rare intervals 

 and then solely for the sake of heightening the sense of its 

 difference and remoteness. Gloomy towers, gray hereditary 

 halls, a solitary and desolate landscape, subtly suggest to the 

 senses the tragedy of disordered fancy, morbid temperament, 

 diseased will, and abnormal fate which is to be worked out 

 in a series of impressions designed to envelop the reader in 

 an atmosphere of melancholy forebodings. The moment one 

 breathes the air of Poe's tales an oppressive sense of some- 

 thing ominous and sinister is felt. For Poe had the art which 

 Maeterlinck has so successfully practised, of securing posses- 

 sion of the reader's mind by assailing his senses one after 

 the other with the same set of sensations. Poe's tales, like 

 Maeterlinck's plays, are marvellously constructed to shut the 

 reader in by excluding all other objects and impressions until 

 his imagination is entirely at the mercy of the story-teller. 

 Like those Egyptian temples which produced, by architectural 

 devices, an impression of depth and space, out of all propor- 



