The poetical works of Edgar Allan Poe, with original memoir. Illustrated by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., John Tenniel, Birket Foster, Felix Darlay [and others]

MEMOIR.
of his own, which he'could manage as he pleased, was always the
great ambition of his life. He had invented a title, selected a
motto, written an introduction, and made the entire plans for the
great work, which was to be called the " Stylus;" it was the
chimera which he nursed, the castle in the air which he longed
for, the rainbow of his cloudy hopes. But he did not succeed
in establishing it then, and was soon installed as editor of
" Graham's Magazine." As a matter of course he quarrelled with
Graham, and then went to New York, where he engaged as a subeditor on the "Mirror," a daily paper, of which his friend Willis
was editor. But he did not remain long at this employment, which
was' wholly unsuited to him, and he left the "Mirror" without
quarrelling with the proprietor. During his engagements with
these different periodicals, he had written some of his finest
prose tales, had published an anonymous work in the style of
Robinson Crusoe, entitled the "Adventures of Arthur Gordon
Pym," and a collection of his tales in a volume, which he called
"Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque," and gained another
prize by his -story of the Gold Bug. He was beginning to be
known as a fierce and terrible critic, rather than as a poet or a
writer of tales, when the publication of his poem of the Raven
in the "American Review," a New York monthly magazine, first
attracted the attention of the literary world to his singular and
powerful genius. Up to the appearance of this wild fantasy, he had
not been generally recognised as a poet, and had known nothing of
society. But he became at once a lion, and his writings were
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