_Berenice_ casts a shadow first from the fatal library, chamber of doubtful lore, of death, of birth, of pre-natal recollection “like a shadow--vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.” The last words deepen the shadow. Then the “boyhood in books” turns vision into reality, reality into vision. Berenice flashes across the darkened stage, and pines, and falls into trances, “disturbing even the identity of her person.” While the light from her is thus turning to darkness, the visionary’s morbid attentiveness is warped toward a monomania of brooding over trivial single objects. For the sake of the past and visionary Berenice betrothed with horror to the decaying real Berenice, he is riveted in brooding upon her person--her emaciation--her face--her lips--her teeth. The teeth are his final curse. The rest is madness, realised too horribly, but with what final swiftness of force! No catalogue of details can convey the effect of this gradation of eight pages. Yet _Berenice_ is Poe’s first and crudest elaboration. The same static art in the same year moves _Morella_ more swiftly through finer and surer degrees to a perfectly modulated close in five pages. His next study, still of the same year, is in the grotesque. The freer and more active movement of _King Pest_ shows his command of the kinetic short story of incident as well as of the static short story of intensifying emotion. By the next year he had contrived to unite in _Metzengerstein_ the two processes, culminating intensity of feeling and culminating swiftness of action for a direct stroke of terror and retribution. By 1836 Poe knew his art; he had only to refine it. Continuing to apply his method of gradation in both modes, he gained his own peculiar triumphs in the static,--in a situation developed by exquisite gradation of such infinitesimal incidents as compose _Berenice_ to an intense climax of emotional suggestion, rather than in a situation developed by gradation of events to a climax of action. But in both he disclosed the fine art of the short story in drawing down everything to a point.