at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful introduction of scientific details, as in the _Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar_ and _Von Kempelen's Discovery_. In his narratives of this kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_, and similar fictions. While Dickens's _Barnaby Rudge_ was publishing in parts Poe showed his skill as a plot-hunter by publishing a paper in _Graham's Magazine_ in which the very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the finale predicted in advance. In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe resembled Coleridge, who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse often reminds one of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_, still oftener of _Kubla Khan_. Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in the opium habit. But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing else. He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, with melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of verse. It is curious to study the growth of his style in his successive volumes of poetry. At first these are metrical experiments and vague images, original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly removed from nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance, without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed--formed upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a great display of _a priori_ reasoning in his essay on the _Poetic Principle_ and elsewhere--that pleasure and not instruction or moral exhortation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not truth or goodness was its means; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it gave should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was always this indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream--a "ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of time"--filled with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an obvious allegory, as in the _Haunted Palace_, which is the parable of a ruined mind, or in the _Raven_, the most popular of all Poe's poems, originally published in the _American Whig Review_ for February, 1845. Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in _Ulalume_, which, to most people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic