e world this common experience in detail as
though it were his and his alone. He might as well write a detailed
account of how he had the measles and the whooping cough. It was all
right and proper for Mr. Howells to like Heine and Hugo, but, in the
words of the circus clown, "We've all been there."

_Nebraska State Journal_, July 14, 1895

_Edgar Allan Poe_

My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting its roses,
Its old agitations
Of myrtles and roses.

For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies
A holier odor
About it, of pansies--
A rosemary odor
Commingled with pansies.
With rue and the beautiful
Puritan pansies.

--Edgar Allan Poe.

The Shakespeare society of New York, which is really about the only
useful literary organization in this country, is making vigorous
efforts to redress an old wrong and atone for a long neglect.
Sunday, Sept. 22, it held a meeting at the Poe cottage on
Kingsbridge road near Fordham, for the purpose of starting an
organized movement to buy back the cottage, restore it to its
original condition and preserve it as a memorial of Poe. So it has
come at last. After helping build monuments to Shelley, Keats and
Carlyle we have at last remembered this man, the greatest of our
poets and the most unhappy. I am glad that this movement is in the
hands of American actors, for it was among them that Poe found his
best friends and warmest admirers. Some way he always seemed to
belong to the strolling Thespians who were his mother's people.

Among all the thousands of life's little ironies that make history
so diverting, there is none more paradoxical than that Edgar Poe
should have been an American. Look at his face. Had we ever another
like it? He must have been a strange figure in his youth, among
those genial, courtly Virginians, this handsome, pale fellow,
violent in his enthusiasm, ardent in his worship, but spiritually
cold in his affections. Now playing heavily for the mere excitement
of play, now worshipping at the shrine of a woman old enough to be
his mother, merely because her voice was beautiful; now swimming six
miles up the James river against a heavy current in the glaring sun
of a June midday. He must have seemed to them an unreal figure, a
sort of stage man who was wandering about the streets with his mask
and buskins on, a theatrical figure who had