Edgar Allan Poe: An Appreciation

Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore--
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "never--never more!"

THIS stanza from "The Raven" was recommended by James Russell Lowell
as an inscription upon the Baltimore monument which marks the resting
place of Edgar Allan Poe, the most interesting and original figure in
American letters. And, to signify that peculiar musical quality of
Poe's genius which inthralls every reader, Mr. Lowell suggested this
additional verse, from the "Haunted Palace":

And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling ever more,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

Born in poverty at Boston, January 19 1809, dying under painful
circumstances at Baltimore, October 7, 1849, his whole literary
career of scarcely fifteen years a pitiful struggle for mere
subsistence, his memory malignantly misrepresented by his earliest
biographer, Griswold, how completely has truth at last routed
falsehood and how magnificently has Poe come into his own, For "The
Raven," first published in 1845, and, within a few months, read,
recited and parodied wherever the English language was spoken, the
half-starved poet received $10! Less than a year later his brother
poet, N. P. Willis, issued this touching appeal to the admirers of
genius on behalf of the neglected author, his dying wife and her
devoted mother, then living under very straitened circumstances in a
little cottage at Fordham, N. Y.:

"Here is one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men of
genius, and one of the most industrious of the literary profession of
our country, whose temporary suspension of labor, from bodily
illness, drops him immediately to a level with the common objects of
public charity. There is no intermediate stopping-place, no
respectful shelter, where, with the delicacy due to genius and
culture, he might secure aid, till, with returning health, he would
resume his labors, and his unmortified sense of independence."

And this was the tribute paid by the American public to the master
who had given to it such tales of conjuring charm, of witchery and
mystery as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Ligeia"; such
fascinating hoaxes as "The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall,"
"MSS. Found in a Bottle," "A Descent Into a Maelstrom" and "The
Balloon Hoax"; such tales of conscience as "William Wilson," "The