Lost Lenore

[...] My father was a man without many friends, and with fewer enemies, for he was a person who attended to his own business, and said but little to any one. He had a talent for silence; and had the good sense not to neglect the exercise of it-as many do the best gifts Nature has bestowed upon them. He died when I was about thirteen years old; and, as soon as he was gone from us, sorrow and misfortune began for the first time to show themselves in our house. There are many families to whom the loss of a parent may be no great calamity; but ours was not one of them; and, young as I was at the time, [...].