But Poe is as far away from the crude and bungling methods of the earlier writers as he is near their materials. How cracking doors and opening vaults, quaking houses, and walking dead, outer terrific elements and inner terrific sensation and morbid imaginative perception reaching madness, can be fused into one harmonized, unified, piercing, intense prose poem he has shown us in this same "Fall of the House of Usher." Nothing of the kind could be better. His own cruder attempt is set forth in the fore-study, "Berenice," which might be considered good if the other story were not immeasurably better. A side sketch of quite a different tone, yet almost as weird, is his beautiful color symphony of the "Masque of the Red Death." All are exquisite artistic creations. [Stevenson] Poe's "William Wilson," an imaginative psychological horror study of conscience, has been paralleled if not surpassed by Stevenson's "Markheim." "Markheim" is more concrete, especially at the beginning; there is more of story and less of symbolism about it; but the climax is the same, or rather the reverse; for in Poe's story William Wilson's worse self murders his better, while in Stevenson's story Markheim's better self, the murderer, who really hates his deed, triumphs over his worse self, the coward and liar. In Poe's story the weirdness results from the fact that Wilson's conscience, which he kills, is a concrete double with the same name and appearance. Stevenson has united this device of a double with weird place-description and weird deed-narrative. He has kept the thing more psychological and less symbolic by making the second presence explainable as an hallucination, more shadowy than Poe's. [Maupassant and others] "What is It? a Mystery" by Fitz James O'Brien shows how very, very material the horror story may be; and yet O'Brien's is not an uninteresting narrative; for it is full of vigor and truth-likeness in the beginning; the end only is bad art; where the frightened people take a plaster cast of the mysterious being they have captured and can not see. "The Hand" by Maupassant is another such touch horror tale, but of course better told. His "Apparition" is almost pure narrative and builds to a fine realistic climax, despite the ghostliness of the visitant. Matthew's "Venetian Glass" is also weird plot rather than weird place, while "The Wind in the Rose Bush" is emphatically character study, and the "Phantom Rickshaw" is a good old-fashioned, if Oriental, ghost story. [Suggestions on writing a weird tale]