familiarity with his materials.  His experience in the United States Navy gave him a sure hand in the sea novels:  and in a book like “The Spy” he was near enough to the scenes and characters to be studies practically contemporary.  He had the born romanticist’s natural affection for the appeal of the past and the stock elements can be counted upon in all his best fiction:  salient personalities, the march of events, exciting situations, and ever that arch-romantic lure, the one trick up the sleeve to pique anticipation.  Hence, in spite of descriptions that seem over-long, a heavy-footed manner that lacks suppleness and variety, and undeniable carelessness of construction, he is still loved of the young and seen to be a natural raconteur, an improviser of the Dumas-Scott lineage and, even tested by the later tests, a noble writer of romance, a man whom Balzac and Goethe read with admiration:  unquestionably influential outside his own land in that romantic mood of expression which, during the first half of the nineteenth century, was so widespread and fruitful.

III

It is the plainer with every year that Poe’s contribution to American fiction, and indeed to that of the nineteenth century, ignoring national boundaries, stands by itself.  Whatever his sources—­and no writer appears to derive less from the past—­he practically created on native soil the tale of fantasy, sensational plot, and morbid impressionism.  His cold aloofness, his lack of spiritual import, unfitted him perhaps for the broader work of the novelist who would present humanity in its three dimensions with the light and shade belonging to Life itself.  Confining himself to the tale which he believed could be more artistic because it was briefer and so the natural mold for a mono-mood, he had the genius so to handle color, music and suggestion in an atmosphere intense in its subjectivity, that confessed masterpieces were the issue.  Whether in the objective detail of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” with its subtle illusion of realism, or in the nuances and delicatest tonality of “Ligeia,” he has left specimens of the different degrees of romance which have not been surpassed, conquering in all but that highest style of romantic writing where the romance lies in an emphasis upon the noblest traits of mankind.  He is, it is not too much to say, well-nigh as important to the growth of modern fiction outside the Novel form as he is to that of poetry, though possibly less unique on his prose side.  His fascination is that of art and intellect:  his material and the mastery wherewith he handles it conjoin to make his particular brand of magic.  While some one story of Hoffman or Bulwer Lytton or Stevenson may be preferred, no one author of our time has produced an equal number of successes in the same key.  It is instructive to compare him with Hawthorne because of a superficial resemblance with an underlying fundamental distinction.