Several of these literary ladies living in New York had their salons, where they received, upon regular days, their brothers and sisters of the pen, and at which The Dreamer became a familiar figure.

“I meet Mr. Poe very often at the receptions,” gossiped one of the fair poetesses in a letter to a friend in the country.  “He is the observed of all observers.  His stories are thought wonderful and to hear him repeat ‘The Raven’ is an event in one’s life.  People seem to think there is something uncanny about him, and the strangest stories are told and what is more, believed, about his mesmeric experiences—­at the mention of which he always smiles.  His smile is captivating!  Everybody wants to know him, but only a few people seem to get well acquainted with him.”

Chief among the salons of New York was that of Miss Anne Charlotte Lynch—­who was afterward Mrs. Botta.  An entre to her home was the most-to-be-desired social achievement New York could offer, for it meant not only to know the very charming lady herself, but to meet her friends; and she had drawn around her a circle made up of the persons and personages—­men and women—­best worth knowing.  She became one of The Dreamer’s most intimate friends, and always made him and his wife welcome at her “evenings.”  It was not long after “The Raven” had set the town marching to the word “nevermore,” that he made his first visit there—­a visit which long stood out clear in the memories of all present.

In the cavernous chimney a huge grate full of glowing coals threw a ruddy warmth into Miss Lynch’s spacious drawing-room.  Waxen tapers in silver and in crystal candelabra, and in sconces, filled the apartment with a blaze of soft light, lit up the sparkling eyes and bright, intellectual faces of the assembled company, and showed to advantage the jewels and laces of the ladies and the broadcloth of the gentlemen.

Miss Lynch stood at one end of the room between the richly curtained windows and immediately in front of a narrow, gold-framed mirror which reached from the frescoed ceiling to the floor and reflected her gracious figure to advantage.  She was listening with interested attention to Mr. Gillespie, the noted mathematician, whose talk was worth hearing in spite of the fact that he stammered badly.  His subject tonight happened to be the versatility of “Mr. P-P-Poe.”

“He might have been an eminent m-m-mathematician if he had not elected to be an eminent p-p-poet,” he was saying.

To her right Mr. Willis’s daughter, Imogen, was flirting with a tall, lanky young man with sentimental eyes, a drooping moustache and thick, straight, longish hair, whose lately published ballad, “Oh, Don’t You Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?” was all the rage.

To her left the Minerva-like Miss Margaret Fuller whose critical papers in the New York Tribune were being widely read and discussed, was amiably quarreling with Mr. Horace Greely, and upon a sofa not far away Mr. William Gilmore Simms, the novelist and poet, was gently disagreeing with Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith in her contention for Woman’s Rights.