A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not
fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having
conceived with deliberate care a certain unique or single
_effect_ to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he
then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this
preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the
out-bringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In
the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the
tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design.

This idea of a short story should be kept in mind in reading Poe's
works, for he applied his theory perfectly.

The stories are of greater variety than the poems. There are romances
of death whose themes are fear, horror, madness, catalepsy, premature
burial, torture, mesmerism, and revengeful cruelty; tales of weird
beauty; allegories of conscience; narratives of pseudo-science;
stories of analytical reasoning; descriptions of beautiful landscapes;
and what are usually termed "prose poems." He also wrote tales
grotesque, humorous, and satirical, most of which are failures. The
earlier tales are predominantly imaginative and emotional; most of the
later ones are predominantly intellectual. None of the tales touches
ordinary, healthy life; there is scarcely a suggestion of local color;
the humor is nearly always mechanical; there is little conversation
and the characters are never normal human beings. Although the stories
are strongly romantic in subject, plot, and setting, there is an
extraordinary realism in treatment, a minuteness and accuracy of
detail equaling the work of Defoe. This is one secret of the magical
art that not only transports us to the world of dream and vision where
the author's own soul roamed, but for the time makes it all real to