An orphan before he was three years old, Poe was reared by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan of Richmond, Virginia. We are given a glimpse of the boy at the age of six, standing on a table, declaiming and drinking wine as a pledge to the health of the guests. If there was ever a child who ought never to have known the taste of wine, that child was Edgar Allan Poe. He could not touch one glass of it without losing moral and physical self-control.

In 1815 his foster parents went to England and placed him for five years in the Manor School House at Stoke Newington, a suburb of London. The headmaster said that Poe was clever, but spoiled by "an extravagant amount of pocket money. This contrast between his school days

and adult life should be noted. We shall never hear of his having too much money after he became an author.

In 1820 the boy returned with the Allans to Richmond, where he prepared for college and at the age of seventeen entered the University of Virginia. Here he yielded to the temptation of drinking and gambling, and he lost at the gaming table twenty-five hundred dollars in a few months. Mr. Allan thereupon took him out of college and put him in his own counting room. This act and other causes, which have never been fully ascertained, led Poe to leave Mr. Allan's home. The foster father had perhaps unconsciously sowed the wind in rearing the boy, but objected to reaping the whirlwind.

Poe then went to Boston, where, at the age of eighteen, he published a thin volume entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems. Disappointed at not being able to live by his pen, he served two years in the army as a common soldier, giving both an assumed name and age. He finally secured an appointment to West Point after he was actually beyond the legal age of entrance. The cadets said in a

joking way that Poe had secured the appointment for his son, but that the father substituted himself after the boy died. Feeling an insatiable ambition to become an author, Poe neglected his duties at West Point, and he was discharged at the age of twenty-two, after less than a year's stay there.

His Great Struggle. Soon after leaving West Point, Poe went to his kindred in Baltimore. In a garret in that southern city, he first discovered his power in writing prose tales. In 1833 his story, MS. Found in a Bottle, won a prize of one hundred dollars offered by a Baltimore paper. In 1834 Mr. Allan died without mentioning Poe in his will; and in spite of his utmost literary efforts, Poe had to borrow money to keep from starving.

After struggling for four years in Baltimore, he went to Richmond and became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. He worked very hard in this position, sometimes contributing to a single number as much as forty pages of matter, mostly editorials and criticisms of books. In Baltimore he had tested his power of writing short stories, but in Richmond his work laid the foundation of his reputation as a literary critic. While here, he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, but even his affection for her did not enable him to withstand the conviviality of the place. A little drink was poison in his veins, unfitting him for work. Although his genius had increased the circulation of the Messenger sevenfold within two years, its proprietor felt obliged to dispense with Poe's services.

The principal part of the rest of his life was passed in Philadelphia and New York, where he served as editor of various periodicals and wrote stories and poems. In the former city, he wrote most of the tales for which he is to-day famous. With the publication of his poem, The

Raven, in New York in 1845, he reached the summit of his fame. In that year he wrote to a friend, "The Raven has had a great 'run'. - but I wrote it for the express purpose of running - just as I did The Gold Bug, you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow." And yet, in spite of his fame, he said in the same year, "I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life."

The truth was that it would then have been difficult for the most temperate author to live even in the North without a salaried position, and conditions were worse in the South. Like Hawthorne, Poe tried to get a position in a customhouse, but failed.

He moved to an inexpensive cottage in Fordham, a short

distance from New York City, where he, his wife, and mother-in-law found themselves in 1846 in absolute want of food and warmth. The saddest scene in which any great American author figured was wit

nessed in that cottage in "the bleak December," when his wife, Virginia, lay dying in the bitter cold. Because there was insufficient bed clothing to keep her warm, Poe gave her his coat and placed the family cat upon her to add its warmth.

VIRGINIA CLEMM

Her death made him almost completely irresponsible. The stunning effect of the blow may be seen in the wandering lines of Ulalume (1847). The end came to him in Baltimore in 1849, the same year in which he wrote the beautiful dirge of Annabel Lee for his dead wife. He was found intoxicated, taken to a hospital, where he conversed "with spectral and imaginary objects," passed into a state of delirium, and died at the age of forty.

In anticipation of his end, he had written the lines:

His Tales.

- He wrote more than sixty tales, some of

which rank among the world's greatest short stories.

The

most important of these productions may be classified as tales (1) of the supernatural, like The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia, (2) of conscience, like William Wilson, that remarkable forerunner of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, (3) of pseudo-science, like A Descent into the Maelstrom, (4) of analysis or ratiocination, like The Gold Bug and that wonderful analytical detective story, the first of its kind, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the predecessor of later detective stories, like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and (5) of natural beauty, like The Domain of Arnheim.

This classification does not include all of his types, for his powerful story, The Pit and the Pendulum, does not belong to any of these classes. He shows remarkable versatility in passing from one type of story to another. He could turn from a tale of the supernatural to write a model for future authors of realistic detective stories. He could solve difficult riddles with masterly analysis, and in his next story place a conscience-stricken wretch on the rack and then turn away calmly to write a tale of natural beauty. He specially liked to invest an impossible story with scientific reality, and he employed Defoe's specific concrete method of mingling fact with fiction. With all the seriousness of a teacher of physics, Poe describes the lunar trip of one Hans Pfaall with his balloon, air-condenser, and cat. He tells how the old cat had difficulty in breathing at a vast altitude, while the kittens, born on the upward journey, and never used to a dense atmosphere, suffered little inconvenience from the rarefaction.

lates in detail the accident which led to the detachment from the balloon of the basket containing the cat and kittens, and we find it impossible not to be interested in their fate. He had the skill of a wizard in presenting in remarkably brief compass suggestion after suggestion to in