Poe, who was never backward in giving himself the credit he thought his due, often failed to understand where his own most marvellous achievements lay. In ‘Hans Pfaall’ he claimed originality in the use of scientific data. Had his stories only this to recommend them, they would long since have been forgotten. Nothing so quickly becomes old-fashioned as popular science. The display of knowledge about aerial navigation in ‘Hans Pfaall’ perhaps made a brave show in 1836, but it is childish now. A Hans Pfaall of the Twentieth Century would descend on Rotterdam in a dirigible balloon, and if questioned would be found to entertain enlightened views on storage batteries. Poe talked glibly about sines and cosines and brought noisy charges of astronomical ignorance against his brother writers, but it was not in these things that his genius displayed itself, it was rather in the way this wonder-worker makes one aware of the illimitable stretches of space, the appalling vastness, the silence, the mystery, terror, and majesty of Nature. He is the clever craftsman in his account of how the Dutch bellows-mender started on his aerial travels. But when in two or three paragraphs Poe conveys a sense of height so terrific that the plain fireside reader, indisposed to balloon ascensions, grasps the arms of his chair and clings to the floor with the toes of his slippers lest he fall--then does he display a power with which popular science has nothing to do. This is true of ‘A Descent into the Maelström.’ What scientific fact went into the composition of the piece appears to have been taken from the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, but the valuable part, the sense of life and movement, the crash of the storm, the roar of the waves, the shriek of the vortex, like the cry of lost souls, all this is not to be found in encyclopædias. The story can be read any number of times and its magical power felt afresh each time. But the first reading cannot be described by so tame a phrase as a literary pleasure, it is an experience. Another masterpiece is the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ The din of the storm is not easily got out of one’s ears. With the unnamed hero of the tale we ‘stand aghast at the warring of wind and ocean’ and are chilled by the ‘stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away, into the desolate sky.’ In another group of stories, ‘The Gold-Bug,’ the gruesome ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter,’ the author fabricates mysteries for the express purpose of unravelling them afterwards. Poe, who seldom attempts the creation of a character, actually created one in the person of his famous detective. Dupin is a living being in a world peopled for the most part with shadows.