POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. S3 



then, as now. was on Truth Street at the corner ol Broad 

 way. Mrs. Shew, with a physician's mind, hut nothing ol the 

 poetic, desired merely to relieve the overwrought tension ol 

 the poet's fevered brain. The line she set him was " the little 

 silver hells." By the time he had written eighteen lines the 

 tension was gone and he tell almost immediately into a twelve- 

 hours sleep. Next day Mrs. Shew drove him back to Fordham. 

 The latter part of the summer and the fall of this year were 

 chiefly devoted to a woman of a very different sort, Mrs. 

 Sarah Helen Whitman 'if Providence. She was a poet; she 

 wrote poems and valentines to the impressionable man, 



" I seem 

 To lie entranced as in some wondrous dream; 

 All earthlv joys forgot, all earthly fear. 

 Purged in the Iighl of thy resplendent sphere." 



These are some of her words to Poe. Bu1 she could not 

 give the poet what he needed most. — a physician's wisdom, and a 

 nurse's constant attention. The result was a broken engage- 

 ment, and Poe. disillusioned and embittered, wrote in January. 

 1841). to Mrs. Richmond of Lowell, a new friend: " From this 

 day forth I shun the pestilential society of literary women. 

 They are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonorable set, 

 with no guiding principle hut inordinate self-esteem." 



This Mrs. Annie Richmond, the Annie of his poem, whose 

 friendship he had found on a lecturing trip to Lowell in the 

 summer of 1848, was now his only comfort. Tn January of 

 1849 Poe thought to leave Fordham, and to live with Mrs. 

 Clemm in Lowell near Annie: but there were difficulties in the- 

 way. and by February he had taken the cottage for another 

 year. ( )ther equally sudden changes took place in his affairs. 

 Tn January he was full of hope, in March he was hopeless and 

 penniless. Still the literary work went on; besides various 

 tales of no great merit, the early part of the year saw the 

 composition of Annabel Lee and / : <»r Annie. 



Then came the chance of lecturing at Richmond, and about 



