[figure description] Preface.[end figure description]

Poe, as a Writer.—Poe is distinguished by
many styles and many manners. He is the author
of fictions, as matter-of-fact in their construction and
language as the stories of Defoe, and of tales as
weird and wonderful as those of Hoffman—of amatory
strains, trembling, if not with heart, with passion,
and suffused with the purple glow of love—
and of poems, dirges either in form or in spirit, into
which the genius of desolation has shed its dreariest
essence—of verses, gay with apparent but shallow
joy, and of others dark with a misery which reminds
us of the helpless, hopeless, infinite misery
which sometimes visits the soul in dreams. But,
amid all this diversity of tone and of subject,
the leading qualities of his mind are obvious. These
consist of strong imagination—an imagination,
however, more fertile in incidents, forms, and characters,
than in images; keen power of analysis,
rather than synthetic genius; immense inventiveness;
hot passions, cooled down by the presence of
art, till they resemble sculptured flame, or “lightning
in the hand of a painted Jupiter”; knowledge
rather recherche and varied than strict, accurate, or
profound; and an unlimited command of words,
phrases, musical combinations of sound, and all the
other materials of an intellectual workman. The
direction of these powers was controlled principally
by his habits and circumstances. These made him
morbid; and his writings have all a certain morbidity
about them. You say at once, cool and clear as
most of them are, these are not the productions of a
healthy or happy man. But surely never was there
such a calm despair—such a fiery torment so cased
in ice! When you compare the writings with the
known facts of the author's history, they appear to
be so like, and so unlike his character. You seem
looking at an inverted image. You have the features,
but they are discovered at an unexpected
angle. You see traces of the misery of a confirmed
debauchee, but none of his disconnected ravings, or
of the partial imbecility which often falls upon his
powers. There is a strict, almost logical, method in
his wildest productions. He tells us himself that he
wrote The Raven as coolly as if he had been working
out a mathematical problem. His frenzy is a
conscious one—he feels his own pulse when it is at
the wildest, and looks at his foaming lips in the
looking-glass. You are reminded of the figure of
Mephistophiles in Retzsch's illustrations of Faust,
sitting on the infernal steed, which is moving at
the pace of the whirlwind, with the calm of perfect
indifference.

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