Wrote James Russell Lowell, of the same story,

     “Had its author written nothing else it would have been enough
     to stamp him as a man of genius.”

The cottage in Spring Garden was large enough too, for the sweet uses of hospitality.  By the time the roses on the porch were open, friends and admirers began to find their way to it, and all who came through the white-washed gate and sat down in the green-hooded porch or passed through it into the bright and tasteful rooms felt the poetic charm which this son of genius and his exquisite bit of a wife and the stately mother with the “Mater Dolorosa” expression, threw over their simple surroundings.

Among those who found their way thither was “Billy” Burton, an Englishman, and an actor, who though a graduate of Cambridge was “better known as a commedian than as a literary man.”  He had written several books, however, and was the publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine, of Philadelphia.  Here too, came intimately, Mr. Alexander, one of the founders of The Saturday Evening Post, to which The Dreamer was a frequent contributor, and Mr. Clarke, first editor of The Post and others of what Edgar Poe’s friend, Wilmer, would have dubbed the “press gang” of Philadelphia.

To be intimate with The Dreamer meant to adore the little wife with the face of a Luca della Robbia chorister and the voice which should have belonged to one—­with the merry, irresistible ways of a perfectly happy child,—­and to revere the mother.

The cottage was also found to be large enough (as the fame of its master grew) to be the destination of letters from the literary stars of the day.  Longfellow and Lowell and Washington Irving, on this side of the water, and Dickens, in England, were among Edgar Poe’s numerous correspondents while a dweller in the rose-embowered cottage in Spring Garden.

In addition to the stories, poems, essays and critiques which the indefatigable Dreamer was putting out, he found time to publish a collection of his “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,” in book form.  He was also (unfortunately for him) induced to prepare a work on sea-shells for the use of schools—­“The Conchologist’s First Book,” it was called.  This was unmistakably a mere “pot-boiler” and confessedly a compilation, but it set the little authors whose namby-pamby works the self-appointed Defender of the Purity of Style in American Letters had consigned to an early grave, like a nest of hornets buzzing about his ears.

“Plagarism!” was the burden of their hum.

Even while the discordant chorus was being chanted, however, his wonderfully original tales continued to make their appearance at intervals—­chiefly in The Gentleman’s Magazine, whose editor, at “Billy” Burton’s invitation, he had become.

* * * * *