of the weird and the fantastic.  In his intellectual nature there was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Shelley’s, though, unlike Shelley’s, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and the imagery of ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a mathematician than in a poet.  He studied carefully the mechanism of his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects, such as repetition and monotone and the selection of words in which the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied.  In his Philosophy of Composition he described how his best-known poem, the Raven, was systematically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number of lines was first determined and the word “nevermore” selected as a starting-point.  No one who knows the mood in which poetry is composed will believe that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes the way in which the Raven was conceived and written, or that any such deliberate and self-conscious process could originate the associations from which a true poem springs.  But it flattered Poe’s pride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control not only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of thought and emotion.  Some of his most successful stories, like the Gold Bug, the Mystery of Marie Roget, the Purloined Letter, and the Murders in the Rue Morgue, were applications of this analytic faculty to the solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried treasure or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious crime.  After the publication of the Gold Bug he received from all parts of the country specimens of cipher-writing, which he delighted to work out.  Others of his tales were clever pieces of mystification, like Hans Pfaall, the story of a journey to the moon, or experiments at giving verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful introduction of scientific details, as in the Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and Von Kempelen’s Discovery.  In his narratives of this kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, though in a less degree, the artfully worked up likeness to fact in Edward Everett Hale’s Man Without a Country, and similar fictions.  While Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge was publishing in parts Poe showed his skill as a plot-hunter by publishing a paper in Graham’s Magazine in which the very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and the finale predicted in advance.