turned to
the old house on Haskins, now Carver, Street, where his ill-starred
life began.

The reason given by Poe, "I have resided there all my life until
within the last few years," suggests but slight cause for his love of
Richmond, the home of his childhood, the darkening clouds of which,
viewed through the softening lens of years, may have shaded off to
brighter tints, as the roughness of a landscape disappears and melts
into mystic, dreamy beauty as we journey far from the scene.

The three women who had been the stars in the troubled sky of his
youth irradiated his memory of the Queen City of the South. In the
churchyard of historic old Saint John's, that once echoed to the words
of Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Poe's mother lay
in an unidentified grave. In Hollywood slept his second mother, who
had surrounded his boyhood with the maternal affection that, like an
unopened rose in her heart, had awaited the coming of the little child
who was to be the sunbeam to develop it into perfect flowering. On
Shockoe Hill was the tomb of "Helen," his chum's mother, whose beauty
of face and heart brought the boyish soul

To the Glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Through the three-fold sanctification of the twin priestesses, Love and
Sorrow, Richmond was his home.

So Virginia claims her poet son, the tragedy of whose life is a gloomy,
though brilliant, page in the history of American literature.

There are varying stories told of Poe's Richmond home. The impression
that he was the inmate of a stately mansion, where he was trained to
extravagance which wrought disaster in later years, is not borne out
by the evidence. When the loving heart and persistent will of Mrs.
Allan opened her husband's reluctant door to the orphaned son of
the unfortunate players, that door led into the second story of the
building at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Tobacco Alley, in which
Messrs. Ellis & Allan earned a comfortable, but not luxurious, living
by the sale of the commodity which gave the alley its name. As it was
customary in those days for merchants to live in the same building with
their business, the fact that he did so does not argue that Mr. Allan
was "down on his luck," but neither does it presuppose that he was the
possessor of wealth. But it was a home in the truest sense for little
Edgar, for it was radiant with the love of the tender-hearted woman who
had bro