een lawn is a monument old and
faded which, in an effort to match it with its natty surroundings, has
been set upon a base of glistening white marble. The monument is a
sort of key for the antiquarian, for without it this playground in its
spick-and-span newness might not be readily identified as the old St.
John's Burying-Ground, where once stood the accumulated tombstones of
more than fourscore years, until they were swept away and buried as
deep as those whose memories they marked. A new generation tramples
in and romps over the new park, with no knowledge or thought of what
is below the surface.

The graveyard of St. John's was a quiet, restful place in a quiet,
restful locality in the year 1837, when Edgar Allan Poe had a habit of
wandering through it. In that year Poe lived within a few steps of the
burial-ground in a modest wooden house that was numbered 113 Carmine
Street. He was then in his twenty-eighth year, had published three
volumes of poems, and had written some short stories and criticisms.
He had but just given up the editorship of the _Southern Literary
Messenger_ at Richmond, a position he had secured through the
friendship of John P. Kennedy, who had been his friend in his early
struggles in Baltimore and who was to continue a friend to him through
all his life. In 1832 Poe had first met him, when Kennedy was writing
_Swallow Barn_. Afterwards Kennedy wrote _Horseshoe Robinson_ and
other books before abandoning literature for politics and, in time,
becoming Secretary of the Navy.

[Illustration: The House in Carmine Street]

So Poe came to New York, and with him Virginia, his child wife, who
was already marked a victim of consumption, and there in the Carmine
Street house they lived. Sometimes she walked with her sombre-faced
husband through the nearby burying-ground, but more often she sat at
an upper window from which she could watch him on his ramble. In the
same house lived William Gowans the bookseller of Nassau Street; and
there Poe did work for the _New York Quarterly Review_; there also he
finished _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_.

In another house, some little distance away but in a direct course up
Carmine Street, in Sixth Avenue close by Waverley Place, Poe lived for
a short time, but long enough to write _The Fall of the House of
Usher_ and some magazine work, when he went to Philadelphia to _The
Gentleman's Magazine_, edited by William E. Burton, the famous
comedian. Oddly enou