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Meantime Edgar Poe worked—­and worked—­and worked.

Every number of the Messenger contained page after page of the brilliantly conceived and artistically worded product of his brain and pen.  His heart—­his imagination satisfied and at rest in the love and comradeship of a woman who fulfilled his ideal of beauty, of character, and of charm, whose mind he himself had taught and trained to appreciate and to love the things that meant most to him, whose sympathy responded to his every mood, whose voice soothed his tired nerves with the music that was one of the necessities of his temperament, a woman, withal, who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him—­his harassing devils cast out by this true heartsease, Edgar Poe’s industry and his power of mental production were almost past belief.

As he worked a dream that had long been half-formed in his brain took definite shape and became the moving influence of the intellectual side of his life.  His literary conscience had always been strict—­even exacting—­with him, making him push the quest for the right word in which to express his idea—­just the right word, no other—­to its farthest limit.  Urged by this conscience, he could rarely ever feel that his work was finished, but kept revising, polishing and republishing it in improved form, even after it had been once given to the world.  He had in his youth contemplated serving his country as a soldier.  He now began to dream of serving her as a captain of literature, as it were—­as a defender of purity of style; for this dream which became the most serious purpose of his life was of raising the standard of American letters to the ideal perfection after which he strove in his own writings.

For his campaign a trusty weapon was at hand in the editorial department of the Southern Literary Messenger, which he turned into a sword of fearless, merciless criticism.

Literary criticism (so called) in America had been hitherto mere puffery—­puffery for the most part of weak, prolix, commonplace scribblings of little would-be authors and poets.  A reformation in criticism, therefore, Edgar Poe conceived to be the only remedy for the prevalent mediocrity in writing that was vitiating the taste of the day, the only hope of placing American literature upon a footing of equality with that of England—­in a word, for bringing about anything approaching the perfection of which he dreamed.

The new kind of criticism to which he introduced his readers created a sensation by reason of its very novelty.  His brilliant, but withering critiques were more eagerly looked for than the most thrilling of his stories, and though the little, namby-pamby authors whom the gleaming sword mowed down by tens were his and the Messenger’s enemies for life, the interested readers that were gathered in by hundreds were loud in their praise of the progressiveness of the magazine and the genius of the man who was making it.