In this kingdom by the sea,


Poe was connected at various times and in various capacities with the
"Southern Literary Messenger" in Richmond, Va.; "Graham's Magazine"
and the "Gentleman's Magazine" in Philadelphia.; the "Evening
Mirror," the "Broadway journal," and "Godey's Lady's Book" in New
York. Everywhere Poe's life was one of unremitting toil. No tales and
poems were ever produced at a greater cost of brain and spirit.

Poe's initial salary with the "Southern Literary Messenger," to which
he contributed the first drafts of a number of his best-known tales,
was $10 a week! Two years later his salary was but $600 a year. Even
in 1844, when his literary reputation was established securely, he
wrote to a friend expressing his pleasure because a magazine to which
he was to contribute had agreed to pay him $20 monthly for two pages
of criticism.

Those were discouraging times in American literature, but Poe never
lost faith. He was finally to triumph wherever pre-eminent talents
win admirers. His genius has had no better description than in this
stanza from William Winter's poem, read at the dedication exercises
of the Actors' Monument to Poe, May 4, 1885, in New York:

He was the voice of beauty and of woe,
Passion and mystery and the dread unknown;
Pure as the mountains of perpetual snow,
Cold as the icy winds that round them moan,
Dark as the eaves wherein earth's thunders groan,
Wild as the tempests of the upper sky,