Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/24

 of the best intellectual society of the city. At the request of his hostess, Mr. Poe one evening electrified the gay company, assembled there, by the recitation of the weird poem to whose sad, strange burden so many hearts have since echoed. This was a few weeks previous to the publication of The Raven in the American Review. Mrs. Browning, in a private letter, written a few weeks after its publication in England, says, “This vivid writing—this power which is felt—has produced a sensation here in England. Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it, and some by the music. I hear of persons who are haunted by the ‘Nevermore,’ and an acquaintance of mine who has the misfortune of possessing a bust of Pallas, cannot bear to look at it in the twilight. Then there is a tale going the rounds of the newspapers, about mesmerism, which is throwing us all into ‘most admired disorder’—dreadful doubts as to whether it can be true, as the children say of ghost stories. The certain thing about it is the power of the writer.”