Review," with a pseudo-editorial comment on its form; that Poe received ten
dollars for it; that Willis, the kindest and least envious of fashionable
arbiters, reprinted it with a eulogy that instantly made it town-talk. All
doubt of its authorship was dispelled when Poe recited it himself at a
literary gathering, and for a time he was the most marked of American
authors. The hit stimulated and encouraged him. Like another and prouder
satirist, he too found "something of summer" even "in the hum of insects."
Sorrowfully enough, but three years elapsed,--a period of influence, pride,
anguish, yet always of imaginative or critical labor,--before the final
defeat, before the curtain dropped on a life that for him was in truth a
tragedy, and he yielded to "the Conqueror Worm."

"The American Review: A Whig Journal" was a creditable magazine for the
time, double-columned, printed on good paper with clear type, and
illustrated by mezzotint portraits. Amid much matter below the present
standard, it contained some that any editor would be glad to receive. The
initial volume, for 1845, has articles by Horace Greeley, Donald Mitchell,
Walter Whitman, Marsh, Tuckerman, and Whipple. Ralph Hoyt's quaint poem,
"Old," appeared in this volume. And here are three lyrics by Poe: "The City
in the Sea," "The Valley of Unrest," and _The Raven_. Two of these were
built up,--such was his way,--from earlier studies, but the last-named came
out as if freshly composed, and almost as we have it now. The statement
that it was not afterward revised is erroneous. Eleven trifling changes
from the magazine-text appear in _The Raven and Other Poems_, 1845, a book
which the poet shortly felt encouraged to offer the public. These are
mostly changes of punctuation, or of single words, the latter kind made to
heighten the effect of alliteration. In Mr. Lang's pretty edition of Poe's
verse, brought out in the "Parchment Library," he has shown the instinct of
a scholar, and has done wisely, in going back to the text in the volume
just mentioned, as given in the London issue of 1846. The "standard"