ILLUSTRATIONS

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The home of Augusta Evans Wilson, Ashland place Frontispiece

EDGAR ALLAN POE 20

SIDNEY LANIER 58

HOUSE WHERE TIMROD LIVED DURING HIS LAST YEARS 116

WOODLANDS, THE HOME OF WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS 126

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS 156

SNAP-BEAN FARM, ATLANTA, GEORGIA 166

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY 194

FATHER RYAN 204

St. Mary’s church, Mobile.  Father Ryan’s late
residence adjoining 216

DR. GEORGE W. BAGBY 236

“Avenel” 240

LITERARY HEARTHSTONES OF DIXIE

“The poet of the night”

EDGAR ALLAN POE

“I am a Virginian; at least, I call myself one, for I have resided all my life until within the last few years in Richmond.”

Thus Edgar A. Poe wrote to a friend.  The fact of his birth in Boston he regarded as merely an unfortunate accident, or perhaps the work of that malevolent “Imp of the Perverse” which apparently dominated his life.  That it constituted any tie between him and the “Hub of the Universe,” unless it might be the inverted tie of opposition, he never admitted.  The love which his charming little actress mother cherished for the city in which she had enjoyed her greatest triumphs seemed to have turned to hatred in the heart of her brilliant and erratic son.  In his short and disastrous sojourn in Boston, when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, it is not likely that his thought once turned to the old house on Haskins, now Carver, Street, where his ill-starred life began.

The reason given by Poe, “I have resided there all my life until within the last few years,” suggests but slight cause for his love of Richmond, the home of his childhood, the darkening clouds of which, viewed through the softening lens of years, may have shaded off to brighter tints, as the roughness of a landscape disappears and melts into mystic, dreamy beauty as we journey far from the scene.