Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1869 edition. Excerpt: ... MEMOIR. Edgar Allan Poh was born in Boston, on the 19th of January, 1809. He was named Allan after a wealthy and intimate friend of the family, and when both his parents died his godfather, who, although long married, was childless, adopted the little orphan, then only six years old. Even at this early age Poe was noted for his precocity as well as for his beauty, and Mr. Allan appears to have been extremely proud of his youthful protege, and to have treated him in many respects as his own son. The boy is stated to have been made quite a show-child of by his adopted father;. a tenacious memory and a musical ear, we are informed, enabling him to learn by rote, and declaim to the evening visitors assembled at Mr. Allan's house, the finest passages of English poetry with great effect. "The justness of his emphasis, and his evident appreciation of the poems he recited," we learn, made a striking impression upon his audience, "while every heart was won by the ingenuous simplicity and agreeable manner of the pretty little elocutionist." Gratifying as these exhibitions may have been to his godfather's vanity, the probable consequence of such a system of recurring excitements upon the boy's morbidly nervous organization could scarcely fail to be disastrous. Indeed, in after years, the poet bitterly bewailed the pernicious effects of his childhood's misdirected aims. "I am," he but too truthfully declared, "the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable, and in my earliest infancy I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character. As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed, becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my friends, and of...