been accredited. He was the gentlest of husbands and devoted to his invalid wife. Frequently when she was weaker than usual, he carried her tenderly from her room to the dinner-table and satisfied every whim.

"Mrs. Brennan was noted for her kindheartedness and sympathetic nature, and once I heard her say that Poe read The Raven' to her one evening before he sent it to the Mirror.'

"It was Poe's custom to wander away from the 'house in pleasant weather to Mount Tom,' an immense rock, which may still be seen in Riverside Park, where he would sit alone for hours, gazing out upon the Hudson.

"Other days he would roam through the surrounding woods, and, returning in the afternoon, sit in the big room, as it used to be called, by a window and work unceasingly with pen and paper, until the evening shadows.

No doubt it was upon such an evening, when sitting later than usual by the window, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,' until every one else had retired, and the moon hidden her light behind a cloud, that he heard the tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.' He starts and listens for a moment and then forces open the door, anticipating some midnight visitor but darkness there and nothing more.' For awhile he peers out into the darkness, but he can see no one and returns to his chair.

"Then again he hears the rapping somewhat louder than before.' This time the sound apparently comes from the window and he flings open the shutter, 'when with many a flirt and flutter, in there steps a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.'

VOL. I.-15

"Above the door opening into the hallway, there stood the pallid bust of Pallas.' It was a little plaster cast and occupied a shelf nailed to the door casing, immediately behind the bust, and occupying the space between the top casing and the ceiling; a number of little panes of smoky glass took the place of the partition.

"This bust of Minerva was either removed or broken by one of the Brennan tenants after the family had moved to the city, and no trace of it can be found at the present time.

"Poe was extremely fond of children, and Mrs. O'Beirne used to tell of lying on the floor at his feet and arranging his manuscript. She did n't understand why he turned the written side toward the floor, and she would reverse it and arrange the pages according to the number upon them.

"Mrs. Brennan was never vexed with Poe except on one occasion, when he scratched his name on the mantelpiece in his room. It was a very quaint and old-fashioned affair, with carved fruit and vines and leaves, and Mrs. Brennan always kept it carefully painted. On the day in question Poe was leaning against the mantelpiece, apparently in meditation. Without thinking, he traced his name on the black mantel, and when Mrs. Brennan called his attention to what he was doing he smiled and asked her pardon.

"It seems strange that people will persist in saying that The Raven' was written at the Poe cottage in Fordham, while it is well known that the author did not move to Fordham until 1846, and the poem appeared in the New York Mirror,' in January, 1845, and was copied the following month in the Review.'

"The mantel upon which Poe scratched his name now adorns the library fireplace of Mr. William Hemstreet, at 1332 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, who bought it when the Brennan homestead was demolished, about twelve years ago.

"Mrs. Manley, a daughter of Patrick Brennan, has the lock from Poe's chamber door. It is an oldfashioned affair and fully six inches long and five wide. Mrs. Manley took it as a souvenir when the Brennan home was taken down.

"The present occupant of the Poe cottage at Fordham makes the assertion that the poem was composed at the latter place, and exhibits to the credulous sightseers the very window' where Poe wrote his im

1 The author is indebted to Dr. William Hand Browne, of Baltimore, for this account.

CHAPTER X.

1845.

TALES: POEMS;

LONGFELLOW

WAR; END OF

"THE BROADWAY JOURNAL."

THE year 1845 was, of all Poe's years, perhaps the fullest of work: it was distinguished by the publication of "The Raven," by his editorship of "The Broadway Journal," first as subordinate, then as onethird proprietor, finally as editor and proprietor; the appearance of the complete and, in one sense, final edition of his collected poems; and the collection of twelve of his tales selected and edited (presumably) by Duyckinck, whose name however nowhere appears in the rather shabby-looking volume. Poe's best work had been repeatedly rejected by the Harpers; Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia had shrewdly accepted and published the two-volume Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" in 1840; and now Wiley and Putnam were to immortalize themselves by issuing the twelve Tales and the Poems. The volume of Tales was without preface, extended to 228 pages, and contained the following title-pages and contents (copied from the original edition):

:

Tales | by | Edgar A. Poe. | New York | Wiley and Putnam, 161 Broadway; 1845.

Contents. The Gold-Bug; The Black Cat ; Mesmeric Revelation; Lionizing; The Fall of the House of Usher; A Descent into the Maelström ; The

Colloquy of Monos and Una; The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion; The Murders in the Rue Morgue; The Mystery of Marie Rogêt; The Purloined Letter; The Man in the Crowd.

Poe objected strongly to the selection because he thought it revealed his ratiocinative side too exclusively, to the detriment of the romantic, poetic, humorous, and imaginative facets of his many-sided authorship.

His own opinion of his prose work as revealed in the well-known letter to Lowell (July 2, 1844) was as follows:

My best tales are Ligeia,' 'The Gold-Bug, the Murders in the Rue Morgue,'

6

The Fall of the House of Usher,' the Tell-Tale Heart,' the Black Cat,' William Wilson,' and the Descent into the Maelström'"-" The Gold-Bug" having attained, shortly after its publication, a circulation of 300,000 copies. Only five of these are contained in the Duyckinck collection, which constituted No. 2 of Wiley and Putnam's "Library of American Books."

Early in the year Poe had become entangled in the notoriousLongfellow War," which had smouldered. in a subterranean way ever since the publication of "The Haunted Palace" in the "Southern Literary Messenger," followed six weeks later by Longfellow's "Beleaguered City," and now broke out afresh with renewed fury on the occasion of the appearance of Longfellow's" Waif." Poe was an exceedingly alert and zealous critic, frequently, from his monomania on the subject of plagiarism, pouncing on intangible resemblances or haunting reminiscences as the basis of a long argument in favor of this or that poet's" thefts."