On April 28, 1886, The Daily News (London), published the following curious story about E. A. Poe:—
“The New York Critic has unearthed a story From The Dispatch of Kokomo about the youth of the author of ‘The Raven.’ There dwells a man in Kokomo (Ind.) whose grandfather kept a tavern in Chesterfield, near Richmond (Va.). The story states that, at the Chesterfield tavern, a dissipated-looking young man presented himself one evening about fifty years ago, and asked for a bedroom. When the servant went to call him in the morning he had disappeared, without the prosaic ceremony of settling his bill. In place of that he had left a book with a poem written on the fly-leaf ‘as legible as print.’ Now Edgar Poe’s handwriting was as legible as Thackeray’s, wonderfully clear and beautiful. The poem was signed E. A. P. We quote the first verse, and leave experts to decide whether it is, or is not, by Poe:—
Leonainie, angels named her,
And they took the light
Of the laughing stars, and framed her
In a smile of white,
And they made her hair of gloomy
Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy
Moonshine, and they brought her to me
In a solemn night.