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promptly accepted. Then he entered into a correspondence with White in which he advised the new editor on journalistic principles. He recommended changes in typeface, and also in style. “To be appreciated,” he told him, “you must be read.” White had criticised aspects of “Berenice” as “too horrible,” and Poe admitted the impeachment. But he went onto say that the most successful stories contained “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical. You may say all this is bad taste.” This was Poe's journalistic credo, the principles of which he followed for the rest of his writing career. He had an instinctive understanding of what would attract, and hold the attention of, a newly formed reading public. He understood the virtues of terseness and unity of effect; he realised the necessity of sensationalism and of the exploitation of contemporary “crazes.” In his lifetime he was sometimes condemned as a mere “Magazinist,” but that perilous and badly rewarded profession would be the cradle of his genius.
    As a result of Poe's unasked-for advice on editorial matters, White wrote to him in June, 1835, offering him a post on the journal. His acceptance would mean that he would be obliged to move to Richmond. But the prospect of work, and money, triumphed over any local inconvenience. Poe replied at once, promising his services to the
Southern Literary Messenger
and professing that he was “anxious to settle myself” in his hometown. So in the summer of 1835 Poe returned to the scenes of his childhood.
    He rented a room in a boarding house and, after a period of prevarication in which he applied unsuccessfully for a post as a schoolteacher at Richmond Academy, he joined White's periodical at a salary of sixty dollars per month. It was his first prospect of prolonged paid employment. Quite by chance the headquarters of the
Messenger
were beside the offices of Ellis and Allan, John Allan's erstwhile business, so he was offered daily reminders of his change of status or what he used to call “caste.” He was engaged, after all, in what was essentially hack work. With White abroad gathering subscriptions, Poe was obliged to write most of the periodical himself. He contributed book reviews and squibs and heterogeneous “copy,” all against an advancing deadline; he was also engaged in binding up and addressing the numbers of each edition. Printer's ink was the air he breathed. The periodical came out monthly, at a subscription price of five dollars a year, and comprised some thirty-two double-columned octavo pages. There was a great deal of space to fill.
    • • •
    In August, however, the delicate balance of his nature was entirely overthrown. Maria Clemm wrote to inform him that his cousin Neilson Poe was ready to take in and educate her daughter Virginia at his own expense. There was already some presumption that Poe would one day marry Virginia, and he replied with an hysterical communication which opened “I am blinded with tears while writing this letter.” In the course of it he declared that “I have no desire to live and
will not
,” while adding that “you know I love Virginia passionately devotedly.” The prospect of losing another young female, just as he had lost his mother and Jane Stanard, rendered him almost helpless with grief. “Oh God have mercy on me. What have I
to live for?
Among strangers with
not one soul to love me
.” He also encloseda letter to Virginia in which he called her “my own sweetest Sissy, my darling little wifey” and implored her not to “break the heart of your cousin. Eddy.”
    He invited Mrs. Clemm and her daughter to leave Baltimore in order to live with him in Richmond, and lied that he had “procured a sweet little house in a retired situation.” The house's “situation” was only in his imagination. He had the