I speak to him-he speaks of Lalage! Give up thy soul to penitence, and pray! Listen now-listen !-the faintest sound, And yet the sweetest that ear ever heard! PREFACE. F 'OR nearly thirty years, the English speaking public, while regarding with admiration the genius of Edgar Allan Poe, has been to a large extent ignorant of the true story of his life. This has been largely due to the malignant and false memoir written by Dr. Rufus Griswold, and prefixed to the collection of Poe's works published in New York shortly after his death. Since then, however, various other memoirs have appeared (notably, that one written by Mr. John H. Ingram, who has, perhaps, done more than any other to vindicate the character of Poe), the results of long and painstaking researches on the part of their respective authors, which prove that Griswold's memoir (which for twenty-five years was permitted to stand as the representative biography) was to all intents and purposes a "tissue of the most glaring falsehoods ever combined in a similar work." |