physical condition, to cope with the world. Sometime in the fall of 1843 he made an abortive attempt to issue a new edition of his tales as The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe. There was a small edition in paper covers to be sold at 12% cents, but No. 1 containing "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Man that Was Used Up," is the only one of the series known to have appeared, although one copy containing the first tale only is known to exist. This is the rarest of all Poe items from a collector's standpoint. The little paper pamphlet was the seventh of Poe's works. It brought the author no returns. Reduced to the direst necessity, and finding all avenues closed to him in Philadelphia, he now determined to return to New York. Mrs. Clemm was left behind to close up the house, and on April 6, 1844, taking his invalid wife with him, Poe set out for New York City. He arrived there the same evening with $4.50 in his pockets and no definite prospects. Poe and his invalid wife found shelter in a humble boarding house at 130 Greenwich Street. In immediate need of funds he turned one of his favorite tricks and wrote a false news story for the New York Sun, later republished as "The Balloon Hoax." Such hoaxes were "popular" at the time and indulged in by newspaper editors. The story was clever, is notable even now, and fooled thousands at that time-much to Poe's delight. The money so earned enabled Mrs. Clemm to come over from Philadelphia and join the two in New York. Leaving his family at the Greenwich Street lodgings, Poe then boarded alone for a time with a Mrs. Foster at number 4 Ann Street. During the spring and summer of 1844 he managed to scrape enough together by hack articles, some of which appeared in the Columbia (Pa.) Spy, and Godey's Lady's Book, the Ladies' Home Journal of the day, to exist himself and just barely keep his family. Virginia's health grew steadily worse and in the early summer of 1844 the whole group moved out to the country to a farm located on Bloomingdale Road at what is now Eighty-fourth Street and Broadway. The farm was owned by a kindly Irish couple with a large family, the Brennans. Here for a few months in what was then a charming rural solitude in the beautiful Hudson Valley, Poe seems to have enjoyed a brief period of peace. During this interval he composed "The Raven," or rather put it into final form, as the poem is known to have been in existence in earlier versions as far back as 1842. The idea of the raven itself was taken from Barnaby Rudge. During the summer Poe carried on a correspondence with James Russell Lowell who was writing a brief biography of Poe for Graham's, and with Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers, a Georgia poet whose work undoubtedly influenced the Raven's author. By autumn the poet was again destitute and Mrs. Clemm now exerted herself to secure him some salaried work. She called on Nathaniel P. Willis, then editor of the New York Evening Mirror and persuaded him to employ Poe in a minor editorial capacity. Sometime in the fall of 1844 the family again moved to a town lodging at 15 Amity Street, New York City, where they occupied a few rooms. Poe continued to turn out considerable hack work for Willis and also through the columns of the Mirror found opportunity to call attention to himself, to notice Miss Barrett's (later Mrs. Robert Browning) poetry favorably, and to involve himself in an unfortunate attack upon Longfellow known as the "Little Longfellow War," with various reverberations. By the end of 1844 Poe was ready to sever connection with Willis who remained his firm friend until the end. Through the good offices of Lowell, Poe had been put in touch with some minor journalists about New York who were ready to launch a new weekly to be called The Broadway Journal. Upon this paper Poe was retained in a more important editorial capacity than Mr. Willis could offer him. In January, 1845, Poe's poem "The Raven" was published annoymously in the Evening Mirror in advance of its appearance in the American Whig Review for February. It created a furor, and on Saturday, February 8, 1845, Mr. Willis reprinted it over the author's name in the Evening Mirror. Poe's reputation immediately took on the aspects of fame which it never afterward lost. It is safe to say that no poem in America had ever been so popular. The poet continued to edit the Broadway Journal in which he carried on the Longfellow controversy, reviewed books, published and republished his poetry, wrote dramatic reviews and literary criticism, and reprinted many of his stories now more eagerly read as coming from a famous pen. He was also preparing to become owner of the Broadway Journal and for this purpose went into debt, in the meanwhile quar- reling with Briggs, one of his partners. He now too began for the first time since early Richmond days to lead a less lonely life and to go about in a semi-literary and artistic society. Poe was much seen during the winter of 1845 in the "salons" of various writers and minor social lights of New York who were known as the literati. Through Mr. Willis he met a Mrs. Fanny Osgood, the wife of an artist of some note and a minor poetess, with whom he soon struck up an intimate if not tender friendship. He followed her about to such an extent that she was finally compelled through the scandal involved and on account of her own tubercular condition to go to Albany. Poe pursued her there, then to Boston, and thence to Providence, R. I., where on a lonely walk late one evening be first saw a Mrs. Helen Whitman to whom he afterwards became engaged. The second poem called "To Helen" celebrates this meeting. Lowell visited Poe in New York in the spring of 1845 and found Poe slightly intoxicated in his lodgings at 195 Broadway, whither he had lately moved. In July, Dr. Chivers also visited him and saw him at times much under the influence but nevertheless with the characteristics of genius about him. Poe's affairs despite his growing fame did not prosper. He contributed a series of articles to Godey's Lady's Book on the literati of New York. They were personal sketches combined with the obiter dicta of the author and a dash of literary criticism that caused considerable stir at the time and in one or two cases involved Poe in undignified quarrels. The "Literati Papers" do not