"In the wilderness benighted, lo! at last my guide alighted
On a lowly little cedar that overspread a running rill;
Still his cry of grief he uttered, and around me wildly fluttered,
Whilst unconsciously I muttered, filled with boundless wonder still;
Wherefore dost thou so implore me, piteously implore me still?
Tell me, tell me, Whippoorwill!
These lines on an American bird, like those cited from the Broadway, must have passed under Poe's own eyes, even if he did not give them publication, as at the time they appeared he was assistant-editor to the Evening Mirror.
There is yet another parody on The Raven which Poe is known to have spoken of, and to have most truthfully described, in a letter of 16th June, 1849, as "miserably stupid." The lines, only deserving mention from the fact that they invoked Poe's notice, appeared in an American brochure, now of the utmost rarity, styled The Moral of Authors: a New Satire, by J. E. Tuel, and were dated from the—
"Plutonian Shore,
Raven Creek, In the Year of Poetry
Before the Dismal Ages, A.D. 18—"
A quotation from the lines themselves is needless.
It has been seen how rapidly The Raven winged its way across the Atlantic. The ominous bird had not long settled on the English shores ere its wonderful music had penetrated into every literary home. As a natural consequence of its weird power and artificial
