‘Berenice,’ ‘Ligeia,’ and ‘Morella’ are highly successful experiments in the realm of the morbidly imaginative, and might be grouped under Browning’s discarded title of ‘Madhouse Cells.’ The themes are monstrous, and are only saved from being absurd by the author’s consummate ability to carry the reader with him. Poe could scale a fearful and slippery height, maintaining himself with the slenderest excuse for a foot-hold. A dozen times you would say he must fall, and a dozen times he passes the perilous point with masterly ease. In the hands of a lesser artist than he, how utterly absurd would be a scene like that in ‘Ligeia’ where the opium-eater watches by the bedside of his dead wife. ‘Metzengerstein’ and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ are stories of metempsychosis. ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and ‘Hop-Frog’ turn on the motive of revenge. ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ an episode of the Inquisition, is a study of the preternatural acuteness of the mind while the body undergoes torture. ‘The Assignation’ is a Venetian tale of love and intrigue, and would have been conventional enough in the hands of any one but Poe. The most powerful story in the group is ‘The Red Death,’ a lurid drama of revelry in the midst of pestilence. Difficult as are the themes, and skilful as is the handling, these tales are in a way surpassed by the extraordinary group of romances in which Poe describes the meeting of disembodied spirits. ‘The Power of Words,’ ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una,’ and ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’ are excursions into a world unknown to the rank and file of literary explorers, a world where the most adventurous might well question his ability to penetrate far. In these supermundane pieces, in the prose-poems ‘Silence’ and ‘Shadow,’ in ‘Ligeia,’ and in ‘The Domain of Arnheim,’ Poe’s art is indeed magical. Poe seems to have been fully persuaded in his own mind that he had the gift of humor. The extravaganzas and farcical pieces bulk rather large in his collected writings. In too many of them the author cuts extraordinary mental capers in the most mirthless way. ‘The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,’ ‘How to write a Blackwood Article’ and its sequel, ‘A Predicament,’ satires all on the ways of editors and men of letters, are examples of Poe’s manner as a humorist. The rattling monologue and dry, hard, uncontagious laughter of a music-hall comedian is the nearest parallel. The effect is wholly disproportionate to the bewildering activity of the performer.