In _The American Museum_, of Baltimore appeared his fantastic prose-poem, "Ligeia," with his theory of the power of the human will for a text--his favorite of all of his "tales"--_his_ favorite, in the weakness of whose own will lay the real tragedy of his life! In _The Gift_, of Philadelphia, appeared, a little later the dramatic "conscience-story," "William Wilson," with its clear-cut pictures of school-life at old Stoke-Newington. _The Baltimore Book_ gave the thrilling fable, "Silence," to the world. The weirdly beautiful "Haunted Palace" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" followed in quick succession--in _The American Museum_. "The Fall of the House of Usher," brought The Dreamer a pat-on-the back from "little Tom" White, who in writing of the tale in _The Southern Literary Messenger_, informed the world: "We always predicted that Mr. Poe would reach a high grade in American literature; only we wish Mr. Poe would stick to the department of criticism; there he is an able professor." Wrote James Russell Lowell, of the same story, "Had its author written nothing else it would have been enough to stamp him as a man of genius." The cottage in Spring Garden was large enough too, for the sweet uses of hospitality. By the time the roses on the porch were open, friends and admirers began to find their way to it, and all who came through the white-washed gate and sat down in the green-hooded porch or passed through it into the bright and tasteful rooms felt the poetic charm which this son of genius and his exquisite bit of a wife and the stately mother with the "Mater Dolorosa" expression, threw over their simple surroundings. Among those who found their way thither was "Billy" Burton, an Englishman, and an actor, who though a graduate of Cambridge was "better known as a commedian than as a literary man." He had written several books, however, and was the publisher of _The Gentleman's Magazine_, of Philadelphia. Here too, came intimately, Mr. Alexander, one of the founders of _The Saturday Evening Post_, to which The Dreamer was a frequent contributor, and Mr. Clarke, first editor of _The Post_ and others of what Edgar Poe's friend, Wilmer, would have dubbed the "press gang" of Philadelphia. To be intimate with The Dreamer meant to adore the little wife with the face of a Luca della Robbia chorister and the voice which should have belonged to one--with the merry, irresistible ways of a perfectly happy child,--and to revere the mother. The cottage was also found to be large enough (as the fame of its master grew) to be the destination of letters from the literary stars of the day. Longfellow and Lowell and Washington Irving, on this side of the water, and Dickens, in England, were among Edgar Poe's numerous correspondents while a dweller in the rose-embowered cottage in Spring Garden.