Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/21



is peculiarly true in the case of Edgar Allan Poe that to know him you must know more than the bare facts and dates of his life. These may be summarized as follows:

He was born in Boston, at what is now 62 Carver Street, on January 19, 1809, the triangle at Carver and Broadway having been recently named the Edgar Allan Poe Square. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, a talented and beautiful English actress, had been early left a widow and in 1806 at the age of nineteen had married David Poe, Jr., a native of Baltimore. David Poe was also an actor but does not seem to have shared the rare gifts of his wife or to have inherited the sturdier qualities of his father, a hero of the American Revolution. "My father David died," writes Poe, "when I was in the second year of my age, and when my sister Rosalie was an infant in arms. Our mother died a few weeks before him. Thus we were left orphans at an age when the hand of a parent is so peculiarly requisite. At this period my grandfather's circumstances were at a low ebb, he from great wealth having been reduced to poverty. It was therefore in his power to do but little for us. My brother Henry he took, however, under his charge, while myself and Rosalie were adopted by gentlemen in Richmond, where we were at the period of our