y offered.

Mr. President and Senators, having made the announcement which the
occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains for me to bid you a
final adieu.

FOOTNOTE:

[16] By Permission of Mrs. Davis.

EDGAR ALLAN POE.

~1809=1849.~

EDGAR ALLAN POE was born in Boston while his parents were filling a
theatrical engagement there. His father's family was of Baltimore, his
grandfather being Gen. David Poe of the Revolutionary War, and his
father, also named David Poe, having been born and reared in that
city. His mother, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Arnold, was an
English actress of fascinating beauty and manners.

Left an orphan in 1811, Edgar was adopted by Mr. John Allan, a wealthy
merchant of Richmond, and was educated at private schools and the
University of Virginia, and in 1830 he entered West Point. But he got
himself dismissed the next year and devoted himself thereafter to a
literary life. Mr. Allan declining to aid him further, he had a
wretched struggle for existence.

He seems to have gone to Baltimore and made acquaintance with some of
his relatives; and there he won a prize of $100 by a story, "MS. Found
in a Bottle," and was kindly helped by John Pendleton Kennedy. He
became editor of the "Southern Literary Messenger," in Richmond, and
was afterward engaged on various other magazines, writing stories,
poems, book-reviews, and paragraphs, in untiring abundance.

He married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836, and their life
together was in itself ideally happy, like the life in the Valley of
the Many-Coloured Grass; and Mrs. Clemm, his aunt and mother-in-law,
was the good genius who watched over "her two strange children" with
an unwearying devotion, deserving the tribute of the love and
gratitude embalmed in his sonnet called "Mother."

His engagement with any one magazine rarely lasted long, and there is
much diversity of opinion as to the cause; some ascribing it to Poe's
dissipated, irregular habits and irritable temper, others to the
meagre support of the magazines, still others to Poe's restless
disposition and desire to establish a periodical of his own. His
uncontrolled and high-strung nature, so sensitive that a single glass
of wine or swallow of opium caused temporary insanity, the
uncertainty of his means of subsistence, his wife's frail health and
her death in 1847, were causes sufficient to render unsteady even a
more solid character than Poe seems to have posse