principle of the mind. They illustrate how the mind works.
After the principle is stated the illustration is given.

Can anything be more important and interesting than to know how the
mind thinks, how it is inspired with terror or love or a sense of
beauty? If you know just how the mind of a man works in regard to
these things, you can yourself create the conditions which will make
others laugh or cry, be filled with horror, or overflow with a sense
of divine holiness. Ordinary story-tellers and ordinary poets write
poems or stories that are pretty and amusing; but it is only a master
like Poe who writes to illustrate and explain some great principle.
His stories teach us how we may go about producing similar effects in
the affairs of life. We wish success in business, in society, in
politics. To gain it we must make people think and feel as we think
and feel. To do that we must understand the principles on which men's
minds work, and no poet or writer analyzed and illustrated those
principles so clearly as Poe.

CHAPTER XII

MUSIC AND POETRY

Poe always maintained that music and poetry are very near of kin, and
in nearly all his greatest poems he seems to write in such a way as to
produce the impression of music. As you read his verses you seem to
hear a musical accompaniment to the words, which runs through the very
sounds of the words themselves.

Poe explained that poetry and music are alike in that both obey
absolute laws of time, and that the laws of time or rhythm in poetry
are just as exact as the laws of time in music. He wrote an essay
entitled "The Rationale of Verse," in which he demonstrated that all
the rules for scanning poetry are defective. Every one knows that the
ordinary rules for meter have numerous exceptions, but that if the
rules were exact in the first place, there would be no exceptions.

Perhaps you know something about musical notes. If so, a simple
illustration will show you what "feet" in poetry are. You have perhaps
been taught that a "foot" in verse is an accented syllable with one or
more unaccented syllables, and you scan poetry by marking all the
accented syllables. In Latin, poetry was scanned by marking long
vowels and short. Let us scan the first two lines of "The Raven":

"Once up | on a midnight | dreary, || while I | pondered
| weak and | weary,
Over | many a | quaint and | curious | volume | of
for | gotten | lore."

Observe that most of the f