This habit of mind, this artistic point of view, manifests itself most obviously in harmonisation. Every detail of setting and style is selected for its architectural fitness. The Poe scenery is remarkable not more for its original, phantasmal beauty or horror than for the strictness of its keeping. Like the landscape gardening of the Japanese, it is in each case very part of its castle of dreams. Its contrivance to further the mood may be seen in the use of a single physical detail as a recurring dominant,--most crudely in the dreadful teeth of Berenice, more surely in the horse of Metzengerstein and the sound of Morella’s name, most subtly in the wondrous eyes of Ligeia. These recurrences in his prose are like the refrain of which he was so fond in his verse. And the scheme of harmonisation includes every smallest detail of style. Poe’s vocabulary has not the amplitude of Hawthorne’s; but in color and in cadence, in suggestion alike of meaning and of sound, its smaller compass is made to yield fuller answer in declaring and sustaining and intensifying the required mood. Even in 1835, the first year of his conscious prose form, the harmonising of scene and of diction had reached this degree:-- “But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven, Morella called me to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow upon the waters; and, amid the rich October leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely fallen. “‘It is a day of days,’ she said, as I approached; ‘a day of all days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth and life--ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and death!’ “I kissed her forehead, and she continued: “‘I am dying; yet shall I live.’ “‘Morella!’ “‘The days have never been when thou couldst love me--but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.’ “‘Morella!’ “‘I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection--ah, how little!--which thou didst feel for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live--thy child and mine, Morella’s.’” It is almost the last word of adaptation.