"Of course I can speak only for myself; and for me there is music in the poetry of Byron and of Poe, and there is the psychic effect of color. The rhythm in certain of their poems, with the arrangement of word-sound, produces the saddest music possible, I think, to the soul of man--a prevailing monotone so measured as to result in an effect decidedly strange and quite indescribable. But the real peculiarity of their poetry--and in this Poe excels Byron--is a psychic effect the same as that which remains after viewing certain pictures in black and white, the shade gradations of which are so artistic as to create an illusion of color--sombre, highly shaded, yet color. This color effect of Poe's poetry I have felt very slightly, if at all, immediately on a first reading, as I feel the music of his verse--a rereading, or the lapse of time, being required for its full development. I have not read a line of Poe in the last two or three years, and at the present moment I feel _Ulalume_ as I would some weird scene or picture viewed long ago." I asked him what particular color effects Poe's poetry produced in his mind, and he replied, "The impression of red I do not at all retain. That of black, more or less intense, is predominant; but the color effects of almost any variegated landscape--red being excluded, and the scene having been viewed by moonlight, or in the dusk of evening, or possibly on a densely clouded day--is at this moment alive within me. And yet, with a single exception, I have never received from musical or other sounds a psychic color effect--the exception being that certain tones of a violin leave the same mental impression as does the sight of purple. As I am not acquainted with the technical language of either painter or musician, I can attempt to describe these effects only in common language. I speak for myself only, and am anything but dogmatic on the subject of poetry. The symbolism of Poe's verse we must solve, each for himself. To me, for myself, the solution seems not difficult--and so no doubt says another; but on comparison these solutions would no doubt be very different." But highly as Bainbridge estimated Poe's verse, he placed Poe even higher among writers of prose fiction than among poets. As I have said, I am myself an admirer of Poe. His prose I have always thought the work of a true genius--something, as Doctor Bainbridge said, "more than art, aided by the most perfect art." But when we came to speak of his prose writings, Bainbridge was able to express in language all that I had felt of Poe, and to disclose and explain components of his genius that I had never before fully recognized. I then asked Bainbridge what it was in Poe's prose that he so much admired.