of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss,” is an early foreshadowing of the fulfilment of Joseph Glanvill’s declaration so strikingly illustrated in the return of Ligeia:  “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”  In Ligeia, Poe concentrates on this idea with singleness of purpose.  He had striven to embody it in his earlier sketches, in Morella, where the beloved is reincarnated in the form of her own child, in the musical, artificial Eleonora and in the gruesome Berenice.  In Ligeia, at last, it finds its appropriate setting in the ebony bridal-chamber, hung with gold tapestries grotesquely embroidered with fearful shapes and constantly wafted to and fro, like those in one of the Episodes of Vathek.  In The Fall of the House of Usher he adapts the theme which he had approached in the sketch entitled Premature Burial, and unites with it a subtler conception, the sentience of the vegetable world.  Like the guest of Roderick Usher, as we enter the house we fall immediately beneath the overmastering sway of its irredeemable, insufferable gloom.  The melancholy building, Usher’s wild musical improvisations, his vague but awful paintings, his mystical reading and his eerie verses with the last haunting stanza: 

  “And travellers now within that valley
  Through the red-litten windows, see
  Vast forms that move fantastically
  To a discordant melody;
  While, like a rapid, ghastly river,
  Through the pale door,
  A hideous throng rush out forever
  And laugh—­but smile no more,”

are all in harmony with the fate that broods over the family of Usher.  Poe’s gift for avoiding all impressions alien to his effect lends to his tales extraordinary unity of tone and colour.  He leads up to his crisis with a gradual crescendo of emotion.  The climax, hideous and terrifying, relieves the intensity of our feelings, and once it is past Poe rapidly hastens to the only possible conclusion.  The dreary house with its vacant, eye-like windows reflected at the outset in the dark, unruffled tarn, disappears for ever beneath its surface.

In The Masque of the Red Death the imagery changes from moment to moment, each scene standing out clear in colour and sharp in outline; but from first to last the perspective of the whole is kept steadily in view.  No part is disproportionate or inappropriate.  The arresting overture describing the swift and sudden approach of the Red Death, the gay, thoughtless security of Prince Prospero and his guests within the barricaded abbey, the voluptuous masquerade held in a suite of seven rooms of seven hues, the disconcerting chime of the ebony clock that momentarily stills the grotesque figures of the dancers, prepare us for the dramatic climax, the entry of the audacious guest, the Red Death, and his struggle with Prince Prospero.  The story closes as it began with the triumph of the Red Death.  Poe achieves his powerful effect with rigid economy of effort.  He does not add an unnecessary touch.