Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[207] Allan Poe, nature tried the experiment of bringing extremes together. The outcome of the effort was a perplexing personality, the object of a discussion, not to say dispute, which has never yet been adjusted. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston Jan. 19, 1809, the child of two wandering actors, and was adopted on their death by a wealthy tobacco merchant of Richmond, Va. Though sent to school for a time in England, his training, habits, and tastes all belonged to the Virginia of that day, and with a reckless absence of all the qualities of social rectitude in other respects, he combined strangely enough a singular elevation of mind, a refinement amounting to purity, in all his relations with the other sex: a quality perhaps of more redeeming value than any other single virtue, both for the poet and for the man.

Edgar Allan Poe was, in fact, so far as his art was concerned, a dweller in a visionary land of his own; in his life he was for the most part of the earth earthy. His place in purely imaginative prose-writing is as unquestionable as Hawthorne's. He even succeeded, as Hawthorne did not, in penetrating the artistic indifference of the French mind;