without porch, piazza or any ornamentation, and was near what is now 84th Street and Broadway. General O'Beirne gives a description of the "big room" where "above the door opening into the hallway, stood "the pallid bust of Pallas." "It was a little plaster cast, and occupied a shelf nailed to the door casing immediately behind the bust, and occupying the space between the top casing and the ceiling; a number of little panes of smoky glass took the place of the partition." Mrs. Brennan, to whom Poe read "The Raven" before its publication, denied positively all charges of dissipation against him, and Mrs. O'Beirne recalls how she used to lie on the floor at Poe's feet arranging his manuscript and always carefully reversing it from the way he preferred to have it, placing it with the written side toward the floor.
Poe's engagement with The Broadway Journal, the paper to which Mr. Willis alluded, began with the opening of 1845. Many of the tales and poems revised and published together with a large number of reviews and criticisms appeared in the Journal, and the charges of plagiarism against Longfellow and his friends, opened in The Evening Mirror January 14th, were continued. This most unfortunate, unnecessary and enduring controversy aroused bitter resentment against Poe.
Of himself at this time, Poe writes to Dr. Creed Thomas "For the last three or four months I have been working fourteen or fifteen hours a day, hard at it all the time . . . and yet, Thomas, I have made no money, I am as poor now as ever I was in my life . . . except in hope, which is by no means bankable." Wiley & Putnam were now issuing two volumes of Poe's works—the first,
