his tales. And not alone in physics, but in metaphysics, did his
imagination open up to him just conceptions; so that in the field of
both healthy and morbid mental action his 'intuitive' knowledge was
unerring. 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is so true to the real in
conception, and so consummate in portrayal, that the more one knows
about the mind, the more he inclines to wonder whether these
compositions might not have been aided by actual personal experience.
Yet these delineations are purely imaginative. Take 'The Imp of the
Perverse, The Tell-Tale Heart,' and similar of his stories, not all of
which could in reason have come within the experience of one man, and
which are undoubtedly grounded upon intuitive suggestion."

I asked him which of Poe's tales he thought the best.

"That would indeed be difficult to determine," he replied. "If the
criterion is to be my own intellectual enjoyment, I should mention one;
if my feelings, then another. It is possible that I might select one in
which my intellectual enjoyment, and my feelings pure and simple, were
about equally engaged. We shall probably agree that the most important
object of fiction is to produce in the reader a state of feeling, just
as musical composition is intended to produce a state of feeling--the
short story being comparable with a brief musical production intended to
produce a single variety of emotion; the novel, to the music of an opera
with its many parts, intended each to excite a particular state of
feeling. Naturally prose fiction may, and almost necessarily does, have
other objects. Now the reading of 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
produces a certain state of emotion, and that wholly apart from any
appeal to intellect; no endeavor to do more than produce that state of
feeling is made, nothing more than that is effected, and that much is
attained in a manner which no pen that has traced short-story fiction,