845, by The Raven and Other Poems, a selection of his verse produced by the same publisher. In the series of Poe's work issued during his life time these two constituted the eighth and ninth books respectively. The Tales were in some cases bound in two volumes, and both outputs achieved a minor success. At the same time Poe was known to have been at work on an anthology of various American writers which occupied him from time to time for several years. It was never published, although some fragments of the manuscript exist. Poe's affairs and Virginia's health now once more necessitated a move to the country. While Poe traveled to Baltimore to lecture in the spring of 1846, Mrs. Clemm and Virginia again went to stay at the Bloomingdale farm. A few weeks later we find the entire family at a farm house on "Turtle Bay," now Forty-seventh Street and East River. The stop here was brief. Poe rented a little frame cottage at Fordham, then a small village about fifteen miles from New York, and to this the family moved at the end of May, 1846. In the puny cottage at Fordham, still preserved as a relic in Poe Park, New York City, the poet and his benign mother-in-law, Mrs. Maria Clemm, experienced together the extremes of tragedy in poverty, death, and despair. The summer of 1846 was embittered by a violent quarrel with one T. D. English. whom Poe had attacked acidly in the "Literati Papers." English now "replied," and after a personal encounter with Poe, accused the latter of forgery in the New York Mirror. Poe sued the paper and recovered damages for a small amount in February, 1847. Poe's health was exceptionally bad, his wife continued to sink rapidly, and he himself could neither write much nor obtain employment. During much of the time Mrs. Clemm by various artifices and wiles kept bread in their mouths. She both borrowed and begged, and was even reduced to the necessity of digging vegetables by night in the fields of neighboring farmers. Wi...
