As for Poe himself, he had by close and devoted study of the rules which govern poetic and prose composition--rules which he evolved for himself by analysis of the work of the masters--so added to his own natural gifts of imagination and power of expression, so perfected his taste, that crude writing was disgusting to his literary palate. He had made Literature his intellectual mistress, and from the day he had declared his allegiance to her he had served her faithfully--passionately--and he could brook no flagging service in others. Both his growing power of analysis and his highly developed artistic feeling were brought into full play in this review work. Under his guidance the writings of his contemporaries, whether they were the little authors or the giants such as, in England, Tennyson (who was a prime favorite with him), Macauley, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett, or in America, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Irving, Emerson, stood forth illumined--the weak spots laid bare, the strong points gleaming bright. He unfalteringly declared his admiration of Hawthorne (then almost unknown) in which the future so fully justified him. The tales of Hawthorne, he declared, belonged to "the highest region of Art--an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order." Even the work of the little authors was indebted to him for many a good word, but the little authors hated him and returned the brilliant sallies his pungent pen directed toward their writings with vollies of mud aimed at his private character. No matter what his subject, however, Edgar Poe always wrote with power--with intensity. He seemed by turns to dip his pen into fire, into gall, into vitriol--at times into his own heart's blood. Of the last named type was the story "Eleonora," which appeared, not in _Graham's_, but in _The Gift_ for the new year, and wherein was set forth in phrases like strung jewels the story of the "Valley of the Many-Colored Grass." The whole fabric of this loveliest of his conceptions is like a web wrought in some fairy loom of bright strands of silk of every hue, and studded with fairest gems. In it is no hint of the gruesome, or the sombre--even though the Angel of Death is there. It is all pure beauty--a perfect flower from the fruitful tree of his genius at the height of its power. All of Edgar Poe's work gains much by being read aloud, for the eye alone cannot fully grasp the music that is in his prose as well as his verse. "Eleonora" was read aloud in every city and hamlet of the United States, and at firesides far from the beaten paths--the traveled roads--that led to the cities; for it was written when every word from the pen of Edgar Poe was looked for, waited for, with eager impatience, and when _Graham's Magazine_ had been made in one little year, by his writing, and the writing of others whom he had induced to contribute to its pages, to lead the thought of the day in America.