a different story,[B] scarcely suitable for
repetition here, was told by the friends of the other party. Whatever the
circumstances, they parted in anger, and Mr. Allan from that time
declined to see or in any way to assist him. Mr. Allan died in the spring
of 1834, in the fifty-fourth year of his age, leaving three children to
share his property, of which not a mill was bequeathed to Poe.

[Footnote B: The writer of an eulogium upon the life and genius of Mr.
Poe, in the _Southern Literary Messenger_, for March, 1850, thus refers
to this point in his history:

"The story of the other side is different: and if true, throws a dark
shade upon the quarrel, and a very ugly light upon Poe's character. We
shall not insert it, because it is one of those relations, which we
think, with Sir Thomas Browne, should never be recorded,--being
'verities whose truth we fear and heartily wish there were no truth
therein ... whose relations honest minds do deprecate. For of sins
heteroclital, and such as want name or precedent, there is ofttimes a sin
even in their history. We do desire no record of enormities: sins should
he accounted new. They omit of their monstrosity as they fall from their
rarity; for men count it venial to err with their forefathers, and
foolishly conceive they divide a sin in its society.... In things of this
nature, silence commendeth history: 'tis the veniable part of things
lost; wherein there must never arise a Pancirollus, nor remain any
register but that of hell.'"]

Soon after he left West Point Poe had printed at Baltimore a small volume
of verses, ("Al Aaraaf," of about four hundred lines, "Tamerlane," of
about three hundred lines, with smaller pieces,) and the favorable manner
in which it was commonly referred to confirmed his belief that he might
succeed in the profession of literature. The contents of the book appear
to have been written when he was between sixteen and nineteen years of
age; but though they illustrated the character of his abilities and
justified his anticipations of success, they do not seem to me to evince,
all things considered, a very remarkable precocity. The late Madame
d'Ossoli refers to some of them as the productions of a boy of eight or
ten years, but I believe there is no evidence that anything of his which
has been published was written before he left the university. Certainly,
it was his habit so constantly to labor upon what he had produced--he was
at all times so