word “sombre,” Poe again and again uses the epithet “novel.”  His tales are never, as Hawthorne’s often are, pathetic.  His instinct is always towards the dramatic.  Sometimes he rises to tragic heights, sometimes he is merely melodramatic.  He rejoices in theatrical effects, like the death-throes of William Wilson, the return of the lady Ligeia, or the entry, awaited with torturing suspense, of the “lofty” and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher.  Like Hawthorne, Poe was fascinated by the thought of death, “the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed him night and day,” but he describes death accompanied by its direst physical and mental agonies.  Hawthorne broods over the idea of sin, but Poe probes curiously into the psychology of crime.  The one is detached and remote, the other inhuman and passionless.  The contrast in style between Hawthorne and Poe reflects clearly their difference in temper.  Hawthorne writes always with easy, finished perfection, choosing the right word unerringly, Poe experiments with language, painfully acquiring a conscious, studied form of expression which is often remarkably effective, but which almost invariably suggests a sense of artifice.  In reading The Scarlet Letter we do not think of the style; in reading The Masque of the Red Death we are forcibly impressed by the skilful arrangement of words, the alternation of long and short sentences, the device of repetition and the deliberate choice of epithets.  Hawthorne uses his own natural form of expression.  Poe, with laborious art, fashions an instrument admirably adapted to his purposes.

Poe’s earliest published story, A Manuscript Found in a Bottle—­the prize tale for the Baltimore Saturday Visitor, 1833—­proves that he soon recognised his peculiar vein of talent.  He straightway takes the tale of terror for his own.  The experiences of a sailor, shipwrecked in the Simoom and hurled on the crest of a towering billow into a gigantic ship manned by a hoary crew who glide uneasily to and fro “like the ghosts of buried centuries,” forecast the more frightful horrors of A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841).  Poe’s method in both stories is to induce belief by beginning with a circumstantial narrative of every-day events, and by proceeding to relate the most startling phenomena in the same calm, matter-of-fact manner.  The whirling abyss of the Maelstrom in which the tiny boat is engulfed, and the sensations of the fishermen—­awe, wonder, horror, curiosity, hope, alternating or intermingled—­are described with the same quiet precision as the trivial preliminary adventures.  The man’s dreary expectation of incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story.  In The Manuscript Found in a Bottle, too, we may trace the first suggestion of that idea which finds its most complete and memorable expression in Ligeia (1837).  The antique ship, with its preternaturally aged crew “doomed to hover continually upon the brink