neglect of him. Was he not even at
that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of the
subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug and
The Pit and the Pendulum?--both of which, however, I was soon enough to
read for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were we
not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to
"speak" The Raven and Lenore and the verses in which we phrased the
heroine as Annabellee?--falling thus into the trap the poet had so
recklessly laid for us, as he had laid one for our interminable droning,
not less, in the other pieces I have named. So far from misprizing our
ill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn; he lay upon
our tables and resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety,
even for boyish appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages. Don't
I just recognise the ghost of a dim memory of a children's Christmas
party at the house of Fourteenth Street neighbours--they come back to me
as "the Beans": who and what and whence and whither the kindly
Beans?--where I admired over the chimney piece the full-length portrait
of a lady seated on the ground in a Turkish dress, with hair flowing
loose from a cap which was not as the caps of ladies known to me, and I
think with a tambourine, who was somehow identified to my enquiring
mind as the wife of the painter of the piece, Mr. Osgood, and the so
ministering friend of the unhappy Mr. Poe. There she throned in honour,
like Queen Constance on the "huge firm earth"--all for _that_ and her
tambourine; and surely we could none of us have done more for the
connection.

Washington Irving I "met," with infant promptitude, very much as I had
met General Scott; only this time it was on a steamboat that I
apprehended the great man; my father, under whose ever-patient
protection I then was--during the summer afternoon's sail from New York
to Fort Hamilton--having named him to me, for this long preservation,
before they greeted and talked, and having a fact of still more moment
to mention, with the greatest concern, afterwards: Mr. Irving had given
him the news of the shipwreck of Margaret Fuller in those very waters
(Fire Island at least was but just without our big Bay) during the great
August storm that had within the day or two passed over us. The
unfortunate lady was essentially of the Boston connection; but she must
have been, and probably through Emerson, a fr