Page:Mystery Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.pdf/12

 abstracted from the royal apartments in Paris. No less exciting is the cleverly narrated but blood-chilling story, "Thou Art the Man," a story which relates how a murder had been committed and traced to the scene of its occurrence, and sets forth the means by which the real and not the suspected murderer was discovered and punished. In the fictional artifices and clever, subtle methods made use of by Poe in these and his other abnormally fascinating tales, the author especially well compares with modern, later-day novelists such as Gaboriau of France and "Sherlock Holmes"—Sir A. Conan Doyle—of England. Like them, though even in a higher degree, Poe possessed a marvellous [sic] yet at times fantastic imagination, and a phenomenal command of the resources, in prose and verse, of literary construction. Though he was an unexcelled artist in words, as the present writer has elsewhere remarked, his workmanship is curiously uneven; in one place it is polished and melodious, in another unfiled and jolting. His themes are marked by a like diversity: on one page they are sweet and human; on the next eerie and ghoulish. But through most of his writings, and despite their weirdness and occasional unwholesomeness, there shines the manifest, though fitful, lamp of genius.

, Oct., 1906.