The Poe tradition is kept vigorously alive at the university. Not long
ago a member of the Raven Society, one of the rather too numerous
student organizations, discovered the burial place of Poe's mother, who
was an actress, and who died penniless in Richmond at the age of
twenty-four and was buried with the destitute. By a happy inspiration a
fund was raised among the students for the erection of a monument to
her--an example of fine and chivalrous sentiment on the part of these
young men, which, one feels, is somehow delicately intertwined with the
traditions of the honor system.
The Poe professor of English at the university, when we were there, was
Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, who has since taken the professorship of English
at the United States Naval Academy. By a coincidence which has proved a
happy one for those who love the stories of the late Sidney Porter (O.
Henry), Dr. Smith grew up as a boy with Porter, in Greensboro, North
Carolina. Because of this, and also because of Dr. Smith's own gifts as
a writer and an analyst, it is peculiarly fitting that he should have
undertaken the work which has occupied him for several years past, the
result of which has recently been given to us in the form "The O. Henry
Biography."
Dr. Smith was Roosevelt exchange professor at the University of Berlin
in 1910-11, holding the chair of American History and Institutions.
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