Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/46

 me. The first was that there were batches of letters and papers in existence which presumably threw important light upon Poe's life, but which for the time being I was not able to examine. The second was that I was not satisfied that a sufficiently thorough study had been made of the newspapers published during certain years in at least six cities. The third was that from the spring of 1831 to the autumn of 1833 Poe's life was practically a blank, and that, it was therefore impossible to say what facts were in lurking ready to affect my interpretation of the whole course of his after life. If the Poe who won the prize of $100 in October, 1833, for his story "The MS. Found in a Bottle" was morally and socially the same Poe who got himself dismissed from West Point in March, 1831—if the obscure years marked only a period of intellectual and artistic development such as might have been normally expected, and, if they concealed no experiences essentially different from those recorded between the years 1825 to 1831 and 1834 to 1849, then it seemed possible to construct a biography which would at least stand the tests of the readers and students who accepted my points of view. But suppose the Poe of 1833 was quite a different Poe in some respects from the Poe of 1831; then it was entirely possible that a biography constructed on the theory that he was essentially the same Poe might not stand even subsequent tests applied to it by its naturally partial author. Although the obscure period was a short one, it came at an important point, and it seemed better to stop and begin investigating. A series of accidents carried me back two centuries and over to England, and instead of investigating Poe I got entangled with an