University of Virginia Library

“The edition is published for the benefit of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Maria
Clemm, for whose sake we may wish it the fullest success. It however, deserves,
and will undoubtedly obtain, a large circulation from the desire so many
will feel to lay by a memorial of this singularly-gifted writer and unfortunate
man.”

“Poe's writings are distinguished for vigorous and minute analysis, and
the skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mystery and
terror. There is an air of reality in all his narrations—a dwelling upon particulars,
and a faculty of interesting you in them such as is possessed by few
writers except those who are giving their own individual experiences. The
reader can scarcely divest his mind, even in reading the most fanciful of his
stories, that the events of it have not actually occurred, and the characters had
a real existence.”

“We need not say that these volumes will be found rich in intellectual
excitements, and abounding in remarkable specimens of vigorous, beautiful,
and highly suggestive composition; they are all that remains to us of a man
whose uncommon genius it would be folly to deny.”

“Mr. Poe's intellectual character—his genius—is stamped upon all his productions,
and we shall place these his works in the library among those books not
to be parted with.”

“These works have a funereal cast as well in the melancholy portrait prefixed
and the title, as in the three pallbearing editors who accompany them
in public. They are the memorial of a singular man, possessed perhaps of as
great mere literary ingenuity and mechanical dexterity of style and management
as any the country has produced. Some of the tales in the collection
are as complete and admirable as anything of their kind in the language.”

“A complete collection of the works of one of the most talented and singular
men of the day. Mr. Poe was a genius, but an erratic one—he was a comet
or a meteor, not a star or sun. His genius was that almost contradiction of
terms, an analytic genius. Genius is nearly universally synthetic—but Poe was
an exception to all rules. He would build up a poem as a bricklayer builds a
wall; or rather, he would begin at the top and build downward to the base;
and yet, into the poem so manufactured, he would manage to breathe the breath
of life. And this fact proved that it was not all a manufacture—that the poem
was also, to a certain degree, a growth, a real plant, taking root in the mind,
and watered by the springs of the soul.”

“We have just spent some delightful hours in looking over these two volumes,
which contain one of the most pleasing additions to our literature with
which we have met for a long time. They comprise the works of the late
Edgar A. Poe—pieces which for years have been going `the rounds of the
press,' and are now first collected when their author is beyond the reach of
humar praise. We feel, however, that these productions will live. They
bear the stamp of true genius; and if their reputation begins with a `fit audience
though few,' the circle will be constantly widening, and they will retain a
prominent place in our literature.”