Although it may be doubted whether the fiery and tumultuous rush of a volcano, which may be taken to typify Poe, is as powerful or as impressive in the end as the calm and inevitable progression of a glacier, to which, for the purposes of this comparison only, we may liken Hawthorne, yet the effect and influence of Poe’s work are indisputable.  One might hazard the assertion that in all Latin countries he is the best known of American authors.  Certainly no American writer has been as widely accepted in France.  Nothing better of its kind has ever been done than “The Pit and the Pendulum,” or than “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which Mr. Stoddard has compared recently with Browning’s “Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower came” for its power of suggesting intellectual desolation.  Nothing better of its kind has ever been done than “The Gold-Bug,” or than “The Purloined Letter,” or than “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”  This last, indeed, is a story of marvellous skill:  it was the first of its kind, and to this day it remains a model, not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable.  It was the first of detective-stories, and it has had thousands of imitations and no rival.  The originality, the ingenuity, the verisimilitude of this tale and of its fellows are beyond all praise.  Poe had a faculty which one may call imaginative ratiocination to a decree beyond all other writers of fiction.  He did not at all times keep up to the high level, in one style, of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and in another, of “The Murders in the Hue Morgue;” and it was not to be expected that he should, Only too often did he sink to the grade of the ordinary “Tale from ‘Blackwood,’” which he himself satirized in his usual savage vein of humor.  Yet even in his flimsiest and most tawdry tales we see the truth of Mr. Lowell’s assertion that Poe had “two of the prime qualities of genius,—­a faculty of vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination.”  Mr. Lowell said also that Poe combined “in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united,—­a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed.  Both are, in truth, the natural results of the predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded,—­analysis.”  In Poe’s hands, however, the enumeration of pins and buttons, the exact imitation of the prosaic facts of humdrum life in this workaday world, is not an end, but a means only, whereby he constructs and intensifies the shadow of mystery which broods over the things thus realistically portrayed.