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By Root 16225 0

“Murders of the Rue Morgue,” &c., a prosecuting attorney in the neighborhood here declares are miraculous. I think your French friend, for the most part, fine in his deductions from over-laid & unnoticed small facts, but sometimes too minute & hair-splitting. The stories are certainly as interesting as any ever written. The “Valdemar Case “ I read in a number of your Broadway Journal last winter — as I lay in a Turkey blind, muffled to the eyes in overcoats, &c., and pronounce it without hesitation the most damnable, vraisemblable, horrible, hair-lifting, shocking, ingenious chapter of fiction that any brain ever conceived, or hands traced. That gelatinous, viscous sound of man’s voice! there never was such an idea before. That story scared me in broad day, armed with a double-barrel Tryon Turkey gun. What would it have done at midnight in some old ghostly countryhouse?

I have always found some one remarkable thing in your stories to haunt me long after reading them. The teeth in Berenice -the changing eyes of Morella — that red & glaring crack in the House of Usher — the pores of the deck in the MS. found in a Bottle — the visible drops falling into the goblet in Ligeia, &c. &c. — there is always something of this sort to stick by the mind — by mine at least.

My wife is about to enter the carriage and as I wish to send this to the P.O. by her, I must wind up rapidly. I am now after an interval of months again at work in the preparation of my poems for publication. I am dragging, but perhaps the mood will presently come. I bespeak a review of my Book at your hands when I get it out. I have not time now to copy Rosalie Lee. It is in Griswold’s last edition. I am grateful to you for the literary prop you afford me; and trust to do something to justify your commendations. I talked recently with a little Lady who has heard a lecture of yours in which you praise my poetry — in New York. She had taken up the notion that I was a great poetic roaring Lion. Do with my MS. as you choose. What do you design as to the Stylus? Write to me without delay, if you can rob yourself of so much time.

(Signature missing.)

(Philip Pendleton Cooke.)

E. A. Poe, Esq.

Millwood, Clarke Co. Va. Aug. 4th, 1846.

Edgar Allan Poe to Phillip P. Cooke — August 9, 1846

New-York — August 9. 1846.

My Dear Sir,

Never think of excusing yourself (to me) for dilatoriness in answering letters — I know too well the unconquerable procrastination which besets the poet. I will place it all to the accounts of the turkeys. Were I to be seized by a rambling fit — one of my customary passions (nothing less) for vagabondizing through the woods for a week or a month together — I would not — in fact I could not be put out of my mood, were it even to answer a letter from the Grand Mogul, informing me that I had fallen heir to his possessions.

Thank you for the compliments. Were I in a serious humor just now, I would tell you[,] frankly, how your words of appreciation make my nerves thrill — not because you praise me (for others have praised me more lavishly) but because I feel that you comprehend and discriminate. You are right about the hair-splitting of my French friend: — that is all done for effect. These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious — but people think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method. In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.

Not for the world would I have had any one else to continue Lowell’s Memoir until I had heard from you. I wish you to do it (if you will be so kind) and nobody else. By the time the book appears you will be famous, (or all my prophecy goes for nothing) and I shall have the eclat of your name to aid my sales. But, seriously, I do not think