e. But in general the
tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in the aid of
material forces. The passion of physical fear or of superstitious
horror is that which his writings most frequently excite. These tales
represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly, from the
mere bugaboo story like the _Black Cat_, which makes children afraid to
go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the _Cask of
Amontillado_, or the _Red Death_. Poe's masterpiece in this kind is
the fateful tale of the _Fall of the House of Usher_, with its solemn
and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls, in its
richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such passages as
his _Dream Fugue_, or _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. In descriptive pieces
like the _Domain of Arnheim_, and stories of adventure like the
_Descent into the Maelstrom_, and his long sea-tale, _The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym_, 1838, he displayed, a realistic inventiveness
almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. He was not without a mocking
irony, but he had no constructive humor, and his attempts at the
facetious were mostly failures.

Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no hold upon
the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his
country. His poems and tales might have been written _in vacuo_ for
any thing American in them. Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame
has been so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings have been
favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the _Fleurs du Mal_,
translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy
poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The defect in Poe was in
character--a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life. If
he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of
Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either.

"If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky!"

Though Poe was a Southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and
breeding, there was nothing distinctly Southern about his peculiar
genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with
Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond. The
conditions which had made the Southern colonies unfruitful in literary
and educational works be