Page:Mystery Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.pdf/11

 part not only by his rare mental gifts, which found expression in many impassioned poems to the sex, but by sympathy with his misfortunes and his long and high-hearted struggle with adverse fate.

In re-reading his tales, the more notable of which are collected in the present volume, one can hardly fail to be struck by their ingenious though often weird plots and by their author's felicitous and frequently brilliant diction. These characteristics help to create the haunting atmosphere which enshrouds the personages he introduces to the reader, while the artifices of his style seem to intensify the mystery of the stories. Among the writer-craftsmen of his own and a later age few have excelled him or have more effectively enlisted the art of the literary conjurer for the purposes of ingenious prose narration. Even to-day, Poe stands high in the ranks of such writers, foreign and American, as have followed his lead in the field of the detective and mystery story. This will be readily granted by the reader of the within collection—one which includes those wonderful pieces of invention and thrilling interest, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," together with the ingenious story, "The Gold-Bug," which relates how a vast hidden treasure was recovered through the deciphering of the riddle of a cryptogram. Enthralling also will be found another tale in the series, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," with its curious parallel in the tragic murder of Mary C. Rogers in the vicinity of New York, which suggested the ghastly story. Poe's inventiveness and skilful methods of work are evidenced in "The Purloined Letter," in which the story-teller relates how he for a time baffled his intimate friend, Monsieur Dupin, and the Prefect of the Parisian Police, in the means by which he got on the track of and secured possession of an important document which had been