constantly plagiarizing from him. The best side of Poe's character
came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great
tenderness, patience, and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly,
and his manner and conversation were often winning. In the place of
moral feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his critical papers,
except where warped by passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor
favor, denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending
obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's
books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses
for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who
praised them in flabby reviews--all these Poe exposed with ferocious
honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in
any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as
Bryant's in its austerity.

By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, none of which had
attracted notice, although the latest contained the drafts of a few of
his most perfect poems, such as _Israfel_, the _Valley of Unrest_, the
_City in the Sea_, and one of the two pieces inscribed _To Helen_. It
was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his
more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste.
Hence the same poem frequently re-appears in different stages of
development in successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the
realm 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,