LIAN 10 FE 3:975 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the R. CRAIGHEAD, 81, 83, and 85 Centre Street. "Wild words wander here and there; God's great gift of speech abused "We cannot see thy features right; They mix with hollow masks of night." TENNYSON. "With these keys we may partially unlock the mys tery."-POE's Marginalia. PREFACE. DR. GRISWOLD's Memoir of Edgar Poe has been extensively read and circulated; its perverted facts and baseless assumptions have been adopted into every subsequent memoir and notice of the poet, and have been translated into many languages. For ten years this great wrong to the dead has passed unchallenged and unrebuked. It has been assumed by a recent English critic, that "Edgar Poe had no friends." As an index to a more equitable and intelligible theory of the idiosyncrasies of his life, and as an earnest protest against the spirit of Dr. Griswold's unjust memoir, these pages are submitted to his more candid readers and critics by ONE OF HIS FRIENDS. |