I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate,--the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity.... I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual in man the mass.--I have no belief in spirituality. I think the word a _mere_ word.... You speak of "an estimate of my life,"--and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to anything--to be consistent in anything. My life has been _whim_--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future. An estimate of his own plays and poems can be fairly made only in the light of this thing that he set out to do, a fairness of treatment, by the way, which he often withheld from the objects of his criticism. Not to paraphrase Poe's minute analysis of "The Raven," we may select the "Ulalume" of a year or two later as a production which satisfies the formula of "The Philosophy of Composition" and which is richer in meaning and in self-revelation than any other. In length and tone and subject and treatment it is according to rule. In ninety-four lines of increasing tension the ballad of the bereaved lover is told. The effect toward which it moves is the shocked moment of discovery that grief for the lost love is not yet "pleasurable," but on this anniversary night is still a source of poignant bitterness. It is built around a series of unheeded warnings--as "The Cask of Amontillado" is--which fall with accumulated weight when the lover's cry explains at last the mistrusts and agonies and scruples of the pacified Psyche. The effect is intensified by use of the whole ominous first stanza in a complex of refrains throughout the rest of the ballad. The employment of onomatopoeia, or "sound-sense" words, is more subtle and more effective than in "The Bells" or "The Raven"; and the event occurs in the usual circumscribed space--the cypress-lined alley which is blocked by the door of the tomb.