The episode is of no importance save as it illustrates Poe’s attitude towards the game of life. Poe expected other men to play the game strictly according to the rules, for himself he would play the game in his own way. And he did. But he could not go on breaking the rules indefinitely. They who had his real interest at heart told him as much. Simms, the novelist, wrote Poe in July, 1846, that he deeply deplored his misfortunes--‘the more so as I see no process for your relief but such as must result from your own decision and resolve.’ The letter should be read in its entirety. It does honor to the writer’s manly nature, and it throws no little light on the enigmatic character of Poe. III THE PROSE WRITER Poe’s genius was essentially journalistic. In his prose writing he aimed at an immediate effect, and he knew exactly how to produce it. The journalist does not in general write with a view to the influence his paragraph will produce week after next. The paper will have disappeared week after next, if not day after to-morrow. Though his theme be the eternal verities, the journalist must write as if he had but the one chance to speak on that subject. He will therefore be direct, positive, clear, seeking to persuade, convince, irritate, amuse. The most obvious characteristics of Poe’s style are found in his clarity, his vividness, his precision, in the dense shadows and the high lights, in the hundred unnamed but distinctly felt marks of the journalistic style. Whatever he proposes to do, that he does. There is no fumbling. Even his mysteries are as certain as the stage effects in a spectacular drama; they seem to come at the turning of an electric switch or the inserting of a blue glass before the lime light. In reality the process is much more complicated. Other magicians have essayed to produce like effects by turning the same switch, with disastrous result. Poe was a diligent seeker after literary finish. He was painstaking, and would polish and retouch a paragraph when to the eye of a good judge there was nothing left to do by way of improvement. ‘He seemed never to regard a story as finished.’[26] He was over emphatic at times, and like De Quincey, many of whose irritating mannerisms he had caught, made a childish use of italics. But he had no need of these adventitious supports. It was enough for him to state a thing in his inimitable manner. While his vocabulary was for the most part simple, he was not without his verbal affectations. He loved words surcharged with poetic suggestion. A lamp never hangs from the ceiling, it ‘depends.’ One of his favorite words is ‘domain.’ The black ‘tarn’ which mirrors the house of Usher he could have called by no other term. ‘Lake,’ or ‘pond,’ or ‘pool’ would not have done. The word must be remote, suggestive, mysterious.