Perhaps Poe's technique is more easily examined in those of his tales in which the same faculties that planned the construction supplied also the motive. The three great detective stories, _The Purloined Letter_, _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, and _The Mystery of Marie Roget_, are made of reasoning and built on curiosity, the very mainspring of analysis. It is a profitable delight to take any one of these stories, and, working backwards from the end to the beginning, to follow the mind of the architect. Each of the tales states a difficulty and secretes an explanation that is gradually to be reached by the reader, who identifies the processes of his own mind with those of the analytical Dupin. Starting always with the solution, we can watch Poe refusing the slightest irrelevance, and at the same time artfully piling up detail upon detail in exactly that order best calculated to keep the secret, to heighten the curiosity, to disturb the peace of the reader's mind, and to hold him in conjectural suspense until the end. [Poe's mind.] But it is easy, in considering the technique of Poe's stories, his smiling refusal of 'inspiration,' his confident mastery over his material, to let the brilliance of his analytical powers hide from us his intimacy with the beautiful, the richness and vividness of his imagination, and, particularly, the passionate character of his mind. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was a man whose works were the result of the energetic fusing of an emotional personality into moulds designed by reason. Not all Leonardo's theories and calculations would have sufficed to make a _Mona Lisa_. And if Poe had been merely a skilled technician, like so many of his imitators, we should have had from him only unbeautiful toys no less valueless than theirs. All Poe's work depends, like all Leonardo's, on his power of retaining the poetry, the energy of his material, after submitting it to his constructive science, and then, when the moulds have been made, of pouring it into them red-hot and fluid, as if in the primal vitality of its conception. In those very detective stories, that seem built by and of the coldest-blooded reason, what is it that makes them great but Poe's absorbing passion for the manner of mind of their leading character. Dupin is not a mere detective. He is not an analyst, but analysis. He is the embodiment of the logical spirit in mankind, just as Nicolete, in the old French tale, is the embodiment of the loving spirit in womankind. It is for this reason that some have accused Dupin and Nicolete of a lack of individuality. They are not individual, but universal.