His fault is that he is too lenient to woman poets who never merited that name and to men of mere talent; yet he annihilates many undeserved reputations; perhaps, after all, "thrice slain." No one pointed out the errors in Mrs. Browning's verses as he did; her affectations such as "God's possibles;" her often inefficient rhythm; her incredibly bad rhymes. Yet, for all this, he, whose ear as a poet was almost perfect, made the vile rhyme of "vista" with "sister," that raised the righteous wrath of Rossetti. In his essay on Hawthorne, he warns one from a certain heresy. "The deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as an allegory, is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome." But it is on pages 196-198 of his _Marginalia_ that he gives his final statement in regard to Verse, the Novel, and the Short Story; so far as these questions have any finality. As, for instance, how the highest genius uses his powers in "the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour." As for the Story, it has this immense advantage over a novel that its brevity adds to the intensity of the effect; that "Beauty can be better treated in the poem, but that one can use terror and passion and horror as artistic means." Poe was a master of the grotesque, of the extraordinary, never of the passionate. There is an unholy magic in some of his verse and prose; in his hallucinations, so real and so unreal; his hysterics, his sense of the contradiction between the nerves and the spirit; in his scientific analyses of terrible, foreseen effects, where generally the man of whom he writes is driven into evil ways. For did he not state this axiom: "A good writer has always his last line in view when he has written his first line?" This certainly was part of his _métier,_ made of combinations and of calculations. I read somewhere, "There is nothing wonderful in 'The Raven.'" It is really a _tour de force;_ even if the metre is not invented, he invented the inner double rhymes, and the technique is flawless. It has Black Magic in it; the unreality of an intoxication; a juggler's skill; it will be always his most famous poem. In his analysis of these verses, does not Poe undervalue the inspiration that created them? Yes, by an amusing vanity. And, as Baudelaire says: "A little charlatanism is always permitted to a man of genius, and it doesn't suit him badly. It is like the rouge on the cheeks of a woman actually fair, a new form of seasoning for the spirit."