This quality explains why Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne’s romances, to which a few of them, like William Wilson, and The Man of the Crowd, have some resemblance.  The former of these, in particular, is in Hawthorne’s peculiar province, the allegory of the conscience.  But in general the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in the aid of material forces.  The passion of physical fear or of superstitious horror is that which his writings most frequently excite.  These tales represent various grades of the frightful and the ghastly, from the mere bugaboo story like the Black Cat, which makes children afraid to go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of the Cask of Amontillado, or the Red Death.  Poe’s masterpiece in this kind is the fateful tale of the Fall of the House of Usher, with its solemn and magnificent close.  His prose, at its best, often recalls, in its richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such passages as his Dream Fugue, or Our Ladies of Sorrow.  In descriptive pieces like the Domain of Arnheim, and stories of adventure like the Descent into the Maelstrom, and his long sea-tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838, he displayed, a realistic inventiveness almost equal to Swift’s or De Foe’s.  He was not without a mocking irony, but he had no constructive humor, and his attempts at the facetious were mostly failures.

Poe’s magical creations were rootless flowers.  He took no hold upon the life about him, and cared nothing for the public concerns of his country.  His poems and tales might have been written in vacuo for any thing American in them.  Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame has been so cosmopolitan.  In France especially his writings have been favorites.  Charles Baudelaire, the author of the Fleurs du Mal, translated them into French, and his own impressive but unhealthy poetry shows evidence of Poe’s influence.  The defect in Poe was in character—­a defect which will make itself felt in art as in life.  If he had had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of Whittier he might have been a greater poet than either.

  “If I could dwell
    Where Israfel
  Hath dwelt, and he where I,
    He might not sing so wildly well
  A mortal melody,
    While a bolder note than this might swell
  From my lyre within the sky!”

Though Poe was a Southerner, if not by birth, at least by race and breeding, there was nothing distinctly Southern about his peculiar genius, and in his wandering life he was associated as much with Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and Richmond.  The conditions which had made the Southern colonies unfruitful in literary and educational works before the Revolution continued to act down to the time of the civil war.