After his break with the proprietor, which came suddenly and unaccountably, there was a lapse of a year and a half before he took up his duties with _Burton's Gentleman's Magazine_, continuing in a perfunctory way for about a year (July, 1839-June, 1840) when, with much bitter feeling, the connection was severed. In the following April _Burton's_ was bought out and combined with Graham's feeble monthly, _The Casket_, as _Graham's Magazine_, and Poe gave over his own design to found the _Penn Magazine_ to join forces with a new employer. In the year that ensued he wrote and published several analytical tales and continued his aggressive criticism, while the magazine, under good management, ran its circulation up from eight to forty thousand. Then suddenly, in May, 1842, he was a free lance once more, facing this time two years of duress before he secured another salaried position, now with the _Evening Mirror_ and the tactful Willis, as a "mechanical paragraphist." The months of quiet routine with this combination daily-weekly were marked by one overshadowing event, the burst of applause with which "The Raven" was greeted. It was the literary sensation of the day, it was supplemented by the chance publication in the same month of a tale in _Godey's_ and a biographical sketch in _Graham's_, and it was reprinted in scores of papers. Such general approval, dear to the heart of any artist, seems for the moment to have lifted Poe out of his usual saturnine mood. "I send you an early number of the _B. Journal_," he wrote to his friend F. W. Thomas, "containing my 'Raven.' It was copied by Briggs, my associate, before I joined the paper. 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 has beat the bug, though, all hollow." The reference to his new associate records another editorial shift. Poe's position on the _Mirror_ had been too frankly subordinate to last long, and with the best of good feelings he changed to an associate editorship of the _Broadway Journal_ in February, 1845. With the next October he had realized his long-cherished ambition by obtaining full control; yet before the year was out, for lack of money and of business capacity, his house of cards had fallen and the _Journal_ was a thing of the past. One more magazine contribution of major importance remained for him. This was the publication in _Godey's_, from May to October, 1846, of "The Literati," a series of comments on thirty-eight New York authors, done in his then well-known critical manner. His story-writing was nearly over; "The Cask of Amontillado" was the only important one of the last half dozen, but of the twelve poems later than the "Raven," four--"Ulalume," "To Helen," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells"--are among his best known.