In the three works, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, by Edgar Allan Poe and the poems 340 (“I felt a burial in my brain”) and 355 (“I Felt a Burial in My Brain” It Was Not Death”), each shows different aspects of the depths of the human mind through similar modes of rhetorical sensory overload. While Poe reveals the effects of denying his madness, Dickinson shows the struggle and fall of a depressed spirit. Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" depicts the human mind through the struggle to distinguish reality from imagination. Poe uses the narrator/agonist to demonstrate how the suffering of perceived sense acuity, in relation to anxiety, leads to an unwanted climax. The narrator describes his own nervous behavior as a “disease” that has “sharpened [his] senses” (691). Poe's use of the term "disease" indicates disorder and destruction, and also foreshadows the spread and consummation of the narrator's fear. The confidence that results from the narrator's justified senses proves to distance him further from his own morality. For example, he states: Furthermore, his senses come from his obsession and hatred for the old man's eye. This is demonstrated by the distinct characteristics he places on the eye: "vulture eye", "pale blue eye", "evil eye", and "cursed spot" (691-693). The entire descriptions throughout his efforts to kill the old man show the torment he suffers from his psychosis. The narrator's statement, "it haunted me day and night," shows his motivation for killing the old man. However, the significance of the fact that the narrator actually committed the murderous act demonstrates the final loss of his rationality and morality. Poe shows that the dark side of the mind is the result of this loss of the middle of the paper, of the veil of their faces", illustrates the obsession of the townspeople which diverts their possible reflection and understanding of their own sin symbolized by the black veil of the minister. Additionally, the minister seems to bear the burden of his people's sins, much like Goodman Brown, in that he perceives and imagines everyone's sin presented before his eyes. Because Goodman Brown allowed his negative opinion of others to dominate his life, “his hour of death was dark” (Hawthorne 395). The significance of his ending demonstrates his inability to accept sin as part of human nature. The culmination of sin demonstrated in both works shows the overwhelming power of sin to control a human being. Hawthorne proves that one cannot consider oneself more righteous because one's own accusations and someone else's judgment are therefore sin itself..