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