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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 Raven," first published in 1845,
and, within a few months, read, recited and parodied wherever the
English language was spoken, the half-starved poet received $10! Less
than a year later his brother poet, N. P. Willis, issued this touching
appeal to the admirers of genius on behalf of the neglected author, his
dying wife and her devoted mother, then living under very straitened
circumstances in a little cottage at Fordham, N. Y.:
"
Here is one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men of
genius, and one of the most industrious of the literary profession of
our country, whose temporary suspension of labor, from bodily illness,
drops him immediately to a level with the common objects of public
charity. There is no intermediate stopping-place, no respectful shelter,
where, with the delicacy due to genius and culture, he might secure
aid, till, with returning health, he would resume his labors, and his
unmortified sense of independence."
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