ceeded to give me some needed advice. I must
make a _study_ of my poem, he said, line by line and word by word, and
revise and correct it until it was as perfect as it could be made. It
was in this way that he himself wrote. And then he spoke of _The
Raven_.

He had before told me of the difficulties which he had experienced in
writing this poem and of how it had lain for more than _ten years_ in
his desk unfinished, while he would at long intervals work on it, adding
a few words or lines, altering, omitting and even changing the plan or
idea of the poem in the endeavor to make of it something which would
satisfy himself.

His first intention, he said, had been to write a short poem only, based
upon the incident of an _Owl_--a night-bird, the bird of wisdom--with
its ghostly presence and inscrutable gaze entering the window of a vault
or chamber where he sat beside the bier of the lost _Lenore_. Then he
had exchanged the Owl for the Raven, for sake of the latter's
"_Nevermore_"; and the poem, despite himself, had grown beyond the
length originally intended.

Does not this explain why the Raven--though not, like the Owl, a
night-bird--should be represented as attracted by the lighted window,
and, perching "upon the _bust of Pallas_," which would be more
appropriate to the original Owl, Minerva's bird? Also, we recognize the
latter in the lines:

"By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore."[9]

[9] As by also:

"And its eyes have all the seeming
Of a demon that is dreaming."

Poe, in adopting the Raven, evidently did not obliterate all traces of
the Owl.

Of these troubles with the poem he had before informed me, and now, in
answer to a remark of mine, he said, in effect:

"_The Raven_ was never completed. It was published before I had given
the final touches. There were in it certain knotty points and tangles
which I had never been able to overcome, and I let it go as it was."

He told how, toward the last, he had become heartily tired of and
disgusted with the poem, of which he had so poor an opinion that he was
many times on the point of destroying it. I believe that his having
published it under the _nom de plume_ of "_Quarles_" was owing to this
lack of confidence in it, and that had it proven a failure he would
never have acknowledged himself the author. He feared to risk his
literary reputation on what appeared to him of such uncertain merit.

He now, in speaking