"But it was in his conversations and his letters, far more than in his published poetry and prose writings, that the genius of Poe was most gloriously revealed. His letters were divinely beautiful, and for hours I have listened to him, entranced by strains of such pure and almost celestial eloquence as I have never read or heard elsewhere. Alas! in the thrilling words of Stoddard, "'He might have soared in the morning light, But he built his nest with the birds of night; But he lie in dust, and the stone is rolled Over the sepulcher dim and cold; He has canceled the ill he has done or said, And gone to the dear and holy dead. Let us forget the path he trod, And leave him now to his Maker, God.'" The influence of Mr. Poe's aims and vicissitudes upon his literature, was more conspicuous in his later than in his earlier writings. Nearly all that he wrote in the last two or three years--including much of his best poetry,--was in some sense biographical: in draperies of his imagination, those who take the trouble to trace his steps, will perceive, but slightly concealed, the figure of himself. The lineaments here disclosed, I think, are not different from those displayed in his biography, which is but a filling up of the picture. Thus far the few criticisms of his life or works that I have ventured have been suggested by the immediate examination of the points to which they referred. I add but a few words of more general description. In person he was below the middle height, slenderly but compactly formed, and in his better moments he had in an eminent degree that air of gentlemanliness which men of a lower order seldom succeed in acquiring. His conversation was at times almost supramortal in its eloquence. His voice was modulated with astonishing skill, and his large and variably expressive eyes looked repose or shot fiery tumult into theirs who listened, while his own face glowed, or was changeless in pallor, as his imagination quickened his blood or drew it back frozen to his heart. His imagery was from the worlds which no mortals can see but with the vision of genius. Suddenly starting from a proposition, exactly and sharply defined, in terms of utmost simplicity and clearness, he rejected the forms of customary logic, and by a crystalline process of accretion, built up his ocular demonstrations in forms of gloomiest and ghastliest grandeur, or in those of the most airy and delicious beauty--so minutely and distinctly, yet so rapidly, that the attention which was yielded to him was chained till it stood among his wonderful creations--till he himself dissolved the spell, and brought his hearers back to common and base existence, by vulgar fancies or exhibitions of the ignoblest passion.