the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled hair; it was blacker than the wings of midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. "Here then, at least," I shrieked aloud, "can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love —of the Lady—of the Lady Ligeia."
The Purloined Letter (1845)
Nil sapietltiae odiosius acumine nimio. Seneca.
[The sub-title or enveloping theme might well be called "The Elusiveness of the Obvious." The story is the last of the tales of ratiocination and, like all of Poe's stories of this type, is poured from the B mould. There is an unmistakable note of autobiography in Poe's masterly defense of the poetical and mathematical faculties conjoined. "As poet and mathematician," says Dupin, "he [the Minister] would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all." Dupin, more fully portrayed in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, is Poe's best known character. He is the original of Doctor Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and of all the other notable detectives in recent literature, though it is hardly true, as Leon Kellner puts it, that "Conan Doyle's copy of Poe's Dupin, the now ubiquitous detective genius, Sherlock Holmes, has crowded his prototype out of the memory of the world." It is one of the curiosities of literature that this story is partly responsible for the phrase, "a scrap of paper," which assumed so sinister a significance at the beginning of the WorldiWar. The phrase emerged as the name of a play put
