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Relinquishes the Project.

among the members of the publishing world. The chief wording of this prospectus was subsequently adopted for the basis of a later project, to be adverted to hereafter, and need not, therefore, be cited from. Want of the necessary funds, and inability to secure a sufficient number of subscribers doubtless caused the failure of the poet's scheme.

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CHAPTER XII.

EDITOR OF GRAHAM'S MAGAZINE.

FOR the five months following Poe's secession, nothing of his of any consequence appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine. The purchaser, Mr. Graham, was not only a man of literary proclivities but also a shrewd man of business, and he speedily recognised the value of the ex-editor's services. In November, therefore, he arranged with Poe to resume his former post on the magazine, which from the beginning of the forthcoming new year was to be amalgamated with another periodical styled the Casket, and henceforward was to be known as Graham's Magazine. To the last-the December-number of the Gentleman's, Poe contributed his gruesome sketch, "The Man of the Crowd." weird record of the solitude-dreading mortal—this impersonation of La Bruyere's "grand malheur de ne pouvoir étre seul "—appeals more strongly to the human heart than any of its author's other prose works, the majority of which, as is so generally acknowledged, subdue the intellect only. What a fascination for the

This

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"The Man of the Crowd."

thoughtful, whose thinking is prompted by heart as well as brain, lurks in these opening sentences of the tale! "It was well said of a certain German book that 'es läszt sich nicht lesen'-it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes, die with despair of heart and convulsion in throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged."

The description of a convalescent's feelings of serene contentment in the return of health, when he finds himself "in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui-moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs," is a faithful portrayal of the experience of many, and is, therefore, widely different from Poe's usual psychological observations, which are mostly based upon the outrè and the abnormal. "The Man of the Crowd" stands forth as a specimen of its author's real genius-his masterly powers of combined suggestiveness and description.

From the beginning of 1841, and for some time

"Murders in the Rue Morgue."

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henceforward, the history of Edgar Poe is merged into, and becomes chiefly, the recital of his literary labours, the most remarkable of which now consisted of contributions to Graham's Magazine. The worthy proprietor of that publication speedily received due reward for his appreciation of Poe's talents. Indeed, it is declared that in a little less than two years the number of subscribers to the magazine increased from five to fifty-two thousand, and this, although aided by Mr. Graham's liberality to his contributors, was mainly due to the new editor. His daring critiques, his analytic essays, and his weird stories, following one another in rapid succession, startled the public, and compelled it to an acknowledgment of his powers. New enemies were created, however, by the dauntless intrepidity with which he assailed the fragile reputations of the small bookmakers, especially in his pungent papers on "Autography."

In the April number of Graham's appeared Poe's world-famed story of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." It was the first of a series-the series aptly termed by Baudelaire, "une espéce de trilogie "— illustrative of an analytic phase of its author's complex mind. The particular idiosyncrasy in which the tale germinated is thus introduced in the exordium :

"The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate

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Draughts exercise the Intellect.

them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

"The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch. of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. . . . I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is