the very well-head of
thought and emotion. Some of his most successful stories, like the
_Gold Bug_, the _Mystery of Marie Roget_, the _Purloined Letter_, and
the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_, were applications of this analytic
faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried
treasure or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious
crime. After the publication of the _Gold Bug_ he received from all
parts of the country specimens of cipher-writing, which he delighted to
work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification,
like _Hans Pfaall_, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments
at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful
introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this
kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie
Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less
degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett
Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While Dickens's
_Barnaby Rudge_ was publishing in parts Poe showed his skill as a
plot-hunter by publishing a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the
very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the finale
predicted in advance.

In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge,
who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse
often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still
oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in
the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing
else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with
melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is
curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of
poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images,
original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little
meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from
nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his
poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance,
without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real
world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed
upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a
great d