[Illustration: OLDEST BUILDING ON THE SQUARE. On this moment of writing
it is still standing on the south of Washington Square.]
Edgar Allan Poe lived with his sick young wife Virginia, on Carmine
Street, and lived very uncomfortably, too. The name of his
boarding-house keeper is lost to posterity, but the poet wrote of her
food: "I wish Kate our cat could see it. She would faint."
Poor Poe lived always somewhere near the Square. Once in a while he
moved away for a time, but he invariably gravitated back to it and to
his old friends there. It was in Carmine Street that he wrote his
"Arthur Gordon Pym," with Gowans the publisher for a fellow lodger; it
was on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place that he created "Ligeia" and
"The Fall of the House of Usher." After Virginia's death, he took a
room just off the Square, and wrote the "Imp of the Perverse," with
her picture (it is said) above his desk. It was at these quarters that
Lowell called on him, and found him, alas! "not himself that day." The
old Square has no stranger nor sadder shade to haunt it than that of
the brilliant and melancholy genius who in life loved it so well.
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