Life and letters of Edgar Allan Poe Author:Edgar Allan Poe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. 1826. POE'S ENVIRONMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.l Albemarle County, in which the University of Virginia is situated, is one of the fine... more »st and most fruitful counties in the Old Dominion. Originally near the centre of Virginia before it was dismembered, it seemed to President Jefferson an ideal spot for the erection of the great institution which he had been planning since 1779 and which, overcoming innumerable obstacles, he succeeded in establishing and opening in March, 1825. Around this lovely land, through which trails for more than one hundred miles the delightful greenery of the South-West Mountains, gather all the confluent lines of grace that characterize a gently mountainous country where, exhausted with uplifting giant Alleghanies, the poetic mountain sprites exercise their ingenuity in carving out graceful vales, long undulating slopes, the winding labyrinths of silver rivers, and wooded dells thick with Vallombrosan shades. 1 Unpublished MSS. Archives of the University of Virginia. Bound Catalogues of the University of Virginia, 1825-44. Schele de Vere Catalogue of Students of the University of Virginia, 1825-75. Files of the University of Virginia Magazine, 1856-57, 1900. H. B. Adams' "Jefferson and the University of Virginia." Albemarle might indeed, apart from its musical name, be called the "picture" county of Virginia, and it was the spirit of the poet who wrote our great epic of the Declaration of Independence that chose this favored spot as the birthplace, cradle, and home of his University. From his own Parnassus of Monticello, three miles away, he looked down and beheld the spacious vale wherein the cunning magic of his persuasive tongue had evoked a scene of Grecian beauty that breathed the spirit of Old World enchantmen...« less