In the America of that time, Poe was like the little boy in the grocer's shop, who, while the shopmen are busy with paper and string, dreams of green meadows and scribbles verses on the sugar bags. Even in Europe he would have been one of those men 'who live on islands in the sea of souls.' There are some like Scott and Gautier who are always called by their Christian names, and can talk unreservedly with a thousand. There are others more aloof in mind of whom it is difficult even to think with familiarity. It seems fitting enough to hear of Scott as Walter or Wattie, and of Gautier as Théo, even in old age; but who would have dared to call that man Tommy who heard in tavern song some echo of the music of the spheres? There are men who cannot be habitually good companions, and, when the talk is at its loudest, turn from the crowd, pull aside the curtain, and look up to see the pale moon far above the housetops. Such a man was Poe. He would have been lonely even in the city of Europe where he could perhaps have found three men of his own aloofness from the inessential, his own hatred of the commonplace, his own intense belief in individualism. He was extraordinarily lonely in America. His love of beauty, his elevation of his work above its results in gold, were next to incomprehensible by that people in that chaotic state of their development. Energetic and wholly practical, fiercely busied with material advancement, they could not understand his passionate, impractical, intellectual existence. His biographer, a literary man, remembered not that he was a great artist, but that he died through drink, not that he had made beautiful things but that he had gained little money by doing so. In the Poe who 'reeled across Broadway on the day of the publication of _The Raven_,' in the Poe who died in an hospital, they forgot the reality, and, in their hurry, found it easy to make a melodrama out of a gentle and inoffensive life. Their traditional idea of Poe allows his extravagances to represent him. It is as if we were to describe some hills by saying there was a lightning flash between the peaks. I prefer to think of the little cottage at Fordham, where he lived with his wife and her mother, and their pets, parrots and bobolinks, a peaceful, small citadel held by those three friends against the world. Throughout Poe's harassed existence this note of gentleness and quiet is always sounding somewhere below the discords of penury and suffering. [His work.]